210 Two Bowls

Tears in the kitchen.

Three black bananas on the counter and a stained index card holding a recipe.

I'd made it so many times I no longer needed the card.

Bananas and violence.

Add two eggs, melted butter, and brown sugar.

Flour, baking powder, salt.

A recipe I knew so well, making it had become jazz.

Leftover porridge, if there was any, plus a slosh of milk

to loosen the batter.

Handfuls of whatever dried fruit I felt like, or chunks of chocolate.

Maybe that one gnarly carrot at the end of the bag, peeled and grated.

If the batter was heavy, I'd give the baking powder a lift with more acid.

A tablespoon of yogurt, a squeeze of lemon, or vinegar if that was all there was to be had.

Standing in the kitchen, warming soup on the stove, trying to convince myself that I wanted to eat it, eyes filling, five seconds from tears spilling over and onto my cheeks.

Seven ingredients I can recite from memory, but cannot, for the life of me, turn into a sequence of actions.

This is norepinephrine.

This is what happens when the neurochemical responsible for attention, for planning, for holding a sequence of steps in your head and executing them one at a time, is depleted.

Seven ingredients are too many decisions.

My brain cannot do seven.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in the kitchen.

At this point in my recovery, I've been spending a lot of time talking to an AI.

Not a chatbot, not the thing that pops up on a website and asks if you need help finding the returns policy.

Something considerably more capable than that.

And I'll come back to that later.

For now, what matters is that I have a health czar.