I make soup exactly like my mother did.
Too much parsley.
Too much care.
Enough food for an accidental village.
Nobody teaches men this part about grief:
how domestic it becomes.
You inherit gestures.
Tastes.
Ways of cutting onions.
Sometimes I stir soup
and suddenly remember her wrists.
Not even her face.
Just wrists moving through kitchen light.
Memory is strange and disrespectful.
Outside, Belgrade is gray and expensive.
Inside, steam on windows.
Jazz low in the background.
My friend sleeping on the couch after heartbreak.
Of course he came to me.
Apparently I look like someone
who keeps extra blankets for emotional emergencies.
The soup helps.
Not completely.
Nothing completely helps.
But people become softer after eating.
More honest.
Which is maybe all cooking ever was:
a small interruption of loneliness.
One day I will make this soup for someone I love.
He will ask me why there is so much parsley.
And I will say:
“My mother.”
And he will not ask anything else.
That is the entire point of having a kitchen.
That is the entire point of surviving.