there are a lot of luxuries associated with living alone. the thermostat becomes a direct democracy with one voter. the television is never mysteriously left on a channel showing men discussing golf. every horizontal surface can temporarily become a place where mail lives.
then lunchtime arrives, and the republic collapses.
i posted this because i was hungry, tired, and confronting the deeply unfair fact that being an adult who lives alone means the person responsible for making me lunch is, once again, me. apparently this was not a private grievance. within a few hours, more than a hundred people had liked it, several had reposted it, and the replies had become a small support group for people who would happily cook a beautiful dinner but cannot be expected to manufacture enthusiasm for a sandwich at 12:47 p.m.
the meal is not the hard part
i like cooking. this is important because otherwise the obvious solution would be “you do not like cooking,” and we could all go home, except i am already home, which is the problem.
the exhausting part is being the entire food department. i decide what sounds good, notice what is missing, make the list, buy the ingredients, remember the ingredients exist, cook them before they become a damp historical record, portion the leftovers, wash the dishes, and later discover that the container i confidently labeled “lunch” contains half an onion and no lunch.
when another person makes you food, even something ordinary, the meal arrives carrying a tiny amount of care. somebody noticed you would need to eat before you became irrationally angry at a drawer. they made a decision on your behalf. they performed several boring steps, and then handed you the result. the grilled cheese is not valuable because you lack the technical credentials to melt cheddar. it is valuable because, for fifteen minutes, you were not the project manager of your own continued existence.
independence has a lot of administrative fees
living alone is often described as either perfect freedom or a haunting black-and-white sequence from an antidepressant commercial. mostly, it is neither. mostly, it is nice, punctuated by moments when you would like another person to be in charge of one extremely small thing.
not your finances. not your emotional future. just lunch.
this is one of the quieter things people miss when they live by themselves: not constant company, but ambient care. a cup of coffee already started. somebody asking whether you want anything while they are up. leftovers saved because another person remembered you liked them. these gestures are so small that they barely register when they happen, and so large that their absence can become the entire shape of an afternoon.
the standard advice is meal prep, which is practical, sensible, and emotionally identical to receiving a calendar invitation from your past self. i support meal prep. i have also opened a neatly organized container on wednesday and felt personally managed by the version of me who made it on sunday.
delivery solves a different problem. it gets food to the house, sometimes by showing a tiny bicycle circle making choices no human driver would make. but ordering does not quite reproduce the feeling either. the app has not been thinking about me. the app would sell the same pad thai to a raccoon with a valid credit card.
make somebody lunch
the response to my post made the request feel less like loneliness and more like a broadly neglected form of friendship. we have made dinner into an occasion and brunch into a municipal festival, but lunch remains a clerical task performed near a keyboard.
maybe “can i make you lunch?” should be a more common social offer. not a dinner party, not a reservation, and not an event requiring shoes that hurt. just come over. i have bread, you have soup, and between us we can briefly create a household where neither person has to do every job.
until then, i will continue cooking for one, which is still cooking for somebody. unfortunately, that somebody is an unreliable supervisor who keeps wandering into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, and acting surprised that no staff have arrived.
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