To complicate a dinner.

Tomorrow, I will wake up early, give Dax two bowls of food and a change of water, carry a flourless chocolate cake with roasted pears and a blue backpack of clothes on the Blue line to Damen where I will take the 50 bus to work, work, carry the cake and pears and clothes again but on the 66 bus to the Blue line or maybe to the Red line but definitely to the Loop where I will meet up with Stefan so we can take the METRA to Naperville.

I will meet Stefan’s family. I’ve met his father and stepmother before but now there will be his brother, his stepsister, his stepsister’s children, his stepsister’s husband. I will not talk about politics, religion, or vaccines.

I will think about my family and its dysfunctions, and I will miss them the way I did when I walked by the Christmas tree patch earlier today. There was the smell and if there had been the smell of soot too, my god, I would have felt it deeper. There is the fireplace and how a couple weeks after the Thursday in November, the tree up and decorated, we’d forget to open the flue before it was too late. Duties included fanning the fire alarms, opening the windows.

There is something about joining in on the routine of others and how I want to, see reason why, and of course, actively deny all of that, want to pick it up and turn it, how I enjoy it. My family had one Turkey Thanksgiving until I moved away. The first time I had cranberry jelly was with my roommate, sophomore year of college. I went to Catholic mass until I was 11 but not enough to satiate whatever childhood desire there was to be like my private school friends. I wanted to be white, to be deeply rooted in America, and I fight that desire often but not every day, so here I am, my hair half-straightened, nervous to meet people who will like me fine because, when expected, I am bright and polite and personable.