Sugar, Flour, And Tears

Curdled Milk

Deepti Sharma throws the pint of milk against the door of her fridge, and instantly regrets it. 

There's nothing worse than crying over spilled milk, except when it's curdled. But that's what happens when you don't go to the market for almost a month. She can't remember the last time she ate a real meal, just pulling snacks from her cupboards, shoving strawberries in her mouth, and eating chocolate chips by the handful in the middle of the night. 

It had been a while since she had felt heartbreak, and she couldn't remember it ever hurting this bad. She loved being asleep because it was the only the she had a reprieve from the endless loop in her head as she tried to piece together how she ended a 10-year-relationship by saying the one thing she never, in her lifetime, ever thought she'd say. 

"I want to get married. To you." 

Chris had told her on their first date, which was really more of a hook up, at a party where they met that he was bitterly divorced and had no intention of ever walking down the aisle. Deepti was already 41 at that time, marriage felt like a fleeting romantic fantasy from her teen years. She had never felt the desire to marry, she enjoyed her autonomy, her space, the fact that she could watch whatever she wanted on the television, and if she wanted to just up and move to Ireland, she could. She loved freedom. And her career provided it. 

So when he said it, his soft hazel eyes the color of green cardamom, his mischievous smile taunting her as if daring her to get him into some long discussion about marriage and men. All she did was lean over and kiss him, she pulled his collar close to her, and looked up at him matching his mischief. 

"I wasn't asking." 

And for years, she never did.

 He was an architect, often buried in work, and she had just started her job as a Pastry Chef at the Solstice Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. They were two grown ups, without children, who loved their jobs and who ended up loving each other. 

It was bliss, for a long time. Deepti kept waiting for the shoe to drop, for the fun to stop, for those butterflies that swarmed in her stomach every time she saw him to stop flapping excitedly. But they never did. 

She was dangerously in love with this man, and it started to make her spin. She had heard the stories of love at first sight, her friends who would say "when you know, you know" or "it's just easy when you meet The One," which always made her smirk. Deepti had dated, plenty, she had wonderful boyfriends, terrible ones, and even the ones she left when they started to talk about marriage. 

But Chris, was different. And for the first time she found herself saying "I love you" and she meant it with every particle in her body. She hated it. Every anguishing moment of realizing that you love someone, more than they love you.

 Deepti spent years trying to go back to the cool girl he had met, but she couldn't shove that genie back into the bottle no matter how hard she tried. 

As she stood in her kitchen watching the chunks of curdled milk sliding down her refrigerator door, she took her phone out of her sweater pocket and called the only person she would consider talking too right now. 

"Where the fuck have you been?" Francisca "Franny "answers her phone immediately. "We've been worried sick. I've been to your house, I left multiple messages, I even tried to Facetime you, which as you know, I don't do that for anyone, unless I have full face of makeup.  It's been a month since you've been to work?" 

Franny Reyes runs the cheese bar at the hotel . She makes the salads, a kick ass watermelon gazpacho in the summer, but her real siren song is making the beautiful charcuterie boards that look like works of art.  She's the best in the business, and one of my closest friends seeing as we have a mutual love of soft blue cheeses and terrible men.