On Poaching an Egg and Divorce

If I can poach an egg, maybe I won’t have to leave my marriage.

The thought didn’t come to me fully formed. Whether it was an accident or not, the sudden and unbidden urge to poach an egg coincided with the realization I was thinking about divorce. All of this was strange, primarily because I rarely cook. My husband took care of the cooking, just as he took care of the house and took care of me. In retrospect the metaphor is unsubtle: perfecting a difficult task—the hardest way to cook the easiest thing to cook—that requires care and attention. Tending to something fragile. Occasionally life is poetic, but it is very rarely good poetry. The upshot is  that I became very skilled at this one particular culinary feat and that I am now divorced. Doing one thing over and over again—poach an egg, think about leaving—is an obsessive and perhaps unhealthy way to become good at something, but it worked for me.

From “How to Poach an Egg and Leave a Marriage” by Brandy Jensen for MyRecipes.com; Illustration by Jeremy Nguyen 

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