In the kitchen I find a few eggs from the market. I have some red peppers, too, half a tomato, an onion that hasn't yet lost its vitality. There is garlic, too, and though a few green shoots have begun germinating, it hasn't gone soft. I cut the garlic and the onion on the bare counter. The sound of the blade on the stone is unaccountably pleasing. What I need is bread. I roll a cigarette and walk up the hill, where the bakery should already be in full swing. The van out front has its doors open, and is being loaded with loaves of warm, soft bread - wheat, white, corn. Inside the bakery is the smell of wet yeast, the thwack of hands on dough. The brothers who own it are in back, smoking cigarettes and listening to music. I use what little Greek I possess to barter for a loaf of corn bread fresh out of the oven. I barter for a cigarette for my walk home, too. When I get back, I fry the garlic and onion in olive oil from an old water bottle; a gypsy gave it to me outside of Jimmy's one night. This is still the season of excess here. The garlic turns brown and the onion goes translucent. I chop the tomato, gut and seed the red pepper, slice it lengthwise, with the sinew. I salt and pepper them, and add them to the oil.


In the years before I met Susanna, after I came back from my failed stint in Paris, I ended many days like this. I lived in a leafy Philadelphia suburb, and delivered pizza five nights a week. I would come home to a quiet apartment, and write for a few hours. Then I would walk - sometimes for fifteen minutes, sometimes for two hours - and think about my life, about the women I had loved, about my friends, about my loneliness. It was during the years my brother had disappeared, and I would wonder where he was, what he was doing, whether he was OK. Although those years were brutally lonely, there was a stark, almost impossible beauty to them. I was alone, but not heart broken. Obviously, it was a hard year. My friends were moving on to real jobs, and I was still fucking around delivering pizza and writing fiction no one wanted to read. They all had serious girlfriends, and I had no one. But I truly savored those lonely nights, the quiet of the suburbs, the beauty of the silhouetted trees, the ephemeral glimpses of other lives. I would come home, and write a bit more, and then make eggs and coffee while watching the sun rise. I wouldn't want to build a whole lifetime out of such nights, but now that they've returned, they don't come without a kind of nostalgic gratitude. Part of me thinks I am supposed to be alone like this for most of my days. That I was ever not alone like this seems, increasingly, like a beautiful reprieve from fate. Then, I don't believe in fate, do I? But some things in life you just know. And what I know is that these silent meals feel more honest and true than anything else I do.

I scramble the eggs with the vegetables and slice the bread, which is still warm at its heart. I pour a cup of cold coffee. Then I take the plate up to the roof, where I sit and eat, watching the sky over the mountains slowly, almost impercetibly, turn white.