Salted caramel daze

We used to flirt for hours on end in between school desks, not really knowing what flirting was. We met when we were eleven and the rhythm of our friendship was punctuated by the predictable sound of bells and the shared salted caramel candies we’d contraband during boring lessons. It was just a friendship, but the second summer we parted was the summer I realised how much I missed him. It began like it did the first year of middle school, telling each other that the two months apart would fly by and we would meet again soon in September. I wished him a good flight as he spent his summers at his dad’s house and that was that as we were too young to have cellphones. When September came along I wanted to tell him about the dreams I had been having, about him, and us, how I wished we could be more than just friends, and I also needed to tell him how my first kiss on that summer vacation meant nothing at all as all I could think about was him. But when summer ended he did not come back. The boy I fell for, became just an artefact of my imagination. A complex and faceted tangle of emotions just left there to twist and turn around in the deepest corners of my mind. Until.

We met again a few years later, sometime in early spring. We were both with our respective mothers, both carried along on a grocery trip we would have rather skipped. He was back in town. Our town. And he was smiling at me like he used to when we held hands during winter school trips at the ice rink. 

“Hey” was all he said to me. I was wanderstruck. I did not say anything. I just smiled while screaming inside. I tried to play it cool, but probably I had written all over my face how the memory of our days together was still hunting me and how those memories were now adorned by the worlds of Bukowski, Shakespeare and whomever we happen to study that week at school. How a friendship between kids had turned into my idealised love story. Two lovers condemned to be apart. It hurt, but it was so romantic too, for my sixteen year old self. He did not stop to talk, and neither did I, but a few moments later we met again when we were both sent to get something by our mothers. He handed me his mom’s list and a pen. I wrote my number in between scribbled grocery items. I remember how naive I was, how I thought it was all meant to be. My number. It held the key to our future together. And seeing it there, among the mundane monotony of a grocery list, it felt like a sketch of our reunion, a mirror image of ourselves standing there in the mundane and monotone isles of the local supermarket. It was poetry. It was destiny. Or so I had to interpret that encounter, if I wanted to hold tight to the image of him I had made in my head because, right then and there, the wait began and it lasted so long I had almost began to dismantle the illusion of him I held so dear.

I did not expect his text, because when it arrived, another year had passed. An unmarked number, no profile picture, and a text that said nothing and held every promise in the world at the same time.

“hey” 

“Who are you?

“guess”

We texted day and night. Mostly nights. It began amicably, reminiscing our middle school days together and filling up on what had happened in the years we hadn’t seen each other. He moved to his dad’s because his mom remarried a mean guy with too many children and there was no space for him anymore. I told him about high school and all my ambitions and the recurrent fights with my mom. Talking to him was easy. Any secret I had ever held spilled from the tips of my fingers to the keyboard of my phone fluidly. At the time I was truly convinced he felt the same from the things he confessed to me, but looking back, now I can see how he loved to play with me, to open me up completely. To dig inside my deepest thoughts and fears, just to pass the time.

As the weeks went by the texts turned from friendly, to flirty. We stayed up all night, going back and forth about our wildest dreams and fantasies. He explained many things to me, as I was still pretty naive at the time. He wrote to me short erotic stories where we were the protagonists and I was living for it. He taught me to do the same. I did not care about the boys in my class or the guy from the gym that had asked me out. I did not care about the overdue homeworks or the complaints of my mother about my messy room. I was living on a parallel plane of reality, made of words and empty promises. 

It was literature class when my phone lit up from the pencil case on my desk.

“i’m coming back”

My heart skipped a bit.

“Mom, please, it’s just an old friend, we went to middle school together”.

“You are too young to date. If you want to hang out with him you’ll do it under this roof, when me or dad are at home”.

It was not what I had imagined for our first real hangout, but after some convincing (in afterthought, maybe more convincing than it should have taken) he eventually agreed to the strict conditions my parents imposed on us.

I spent the following week daydreaming while scrolling on recipe websites during school hours. I wanted to make something special for him. Something that would convey all of the feelings that I had carried unexpressed for so long. He was the first one I went to when I needed advice and the last one I would speak to before falling asleep in the deep of the night. On the third day spent scrolling restlessly, other than getting an aching thumb and tired eyes, I had finally found what I was looking for. It was easy and sweet. Dark chocolate muffins with a heart of salted caramel. It had the flavour of our childhood, but it also held a darker grownup twist to it. Though the thing that really sold me on the recipe with whom I would give my heart to him was the poetry that introduced it. I couldn’t believe how the stars were aligning. How everything was falling into place. It was the hundredth blog I clicked on, or so. Maybe on the fourth page or fifth. As obsessive as my search for the perfect recipe was, it was just a matter of time before I ran into that specific post, on a blog where each one of the recipes was introduced by a quote or poem. It checked all the boxes to be a meaningless coincidence, but the fact that the recipe had caramel in it and that the attached quote was from Bukowski, one of the authors I had thought about when we met at the supermarket, it felt like fate was talking directly to me and screaming in my face how this stranger whose features had slowly begun to get blurry in my mind was meant to be my forever.

Mom was surprised when she noticed the method and cure I was putting into baking, as she was used to my experiments in the kitchen and often she was the one to help me clean up the mess left by the recipes I swore I knew by heart and never did. I loved improvising, but I had decided to leave it for another time, as that afternoon no small detail could be left to chance. I was mixing the ingredients by hand, each twist slow and meaningful, while I played back and forth in my mind how I imagined the coming afternoon. He would ring the doorbell just a couple of minutes after I had taken the muffins out of the oven, I would welcome him with the rich smell of chocolate and baked goods. We would hug, maybe we would be a little embarrassed at the beginning, but it would soon go away as we had waited for this day for months and it was finally here. We would go to the living room sofa and watch the movie we had agreed on. And maybe halfway through, I would disappear into the kitchen and bring back two identical and perfectly cooked muffins without telling him about the soft salted caramel heart and watch him as he discovered it himself, bite after bite, that piece of our history that I had hidden there just for him to find. Maybe it wasn’t the best of plans, but for now it was the best I could come up with, given the circumstances, and maybe, if we behaved well that afternoon, next time I could be the one traveling on a plane to his city, where there was no one around to limit where or how we spent our time together, since his father worked long hours. The swirl of ingredients under my spatula was getting darker as I poured in the melted dark chocolate and the clock on the wall also confirmed it was time to put them in the oven, so I poured the mixture in the liners, added a spoon of caramel to each one and let the heat do the magic.

It was predictable. How the perfectly cooked muffins sat untouched on the kitchen island. How the rich smell that had invaded the whole house slowly faded into nothing and how the doorbell never rang. I sat on the sofa all afternoon, looking at the numbers change on the display of my phone, waiting for an answer. Waiting for him.

But he simply disappeared. He answered my seven texts late that night, when my family had already eaten half of the muffins and the smell had completely faded.

“sorry, i had something come up”

Of course he did. And he also forgot to tell me he cancelled his flight two days ago. That was the time I realized he probably never cared. “change of mind”, “busy with some stuff”. I watched him write the epilogue of our love story that probably only ever existed in my mind. 

The next morning I headed to the kitchen to finally taste the muffins. Brokenhearted, I sunk my teeth in one. The rich taste of dark chocolate filled my mouth and a river of salty tears erupted from my eyes when I reached the tender heart of caramel. With the last bite I shredded to pieces what was left of the idea I had of him and through blurry eyes I could finally see how far that idea was from reality.