About a Spoon
An ex wanted to make amends. I turned to one of humanity's oldest tools: the spoon.
I saw the spoon in the early hours of a new year. The party was in Berlin at someone’s apartment, who knows whose. There were too many people and it was too dim, and I was too drunk on whatever I could find. I don’t remember much, but I remember the spoon.
It was stainless steel with a yellow handle, like a spoon from a sitcom. When I picked it up, it was the perfect weight in my hand. The kind of spoon you hold while eating homemade chili in a cottage on a snow day.
I introduced the spoon to a man I had just met. He liked the spoon, too. Or maybe he just liked me. The next afternoon, I woke up to a message from him with a picture of the spoon. He had taken it home.
Later, once I started to like him back, he said I had pushed the spoon on him, that I was his accomplice. For years, I accepted this, but now I’m not so sure. I was drunk and not just drunk at the New Year’s Eve party. I was also charmed. I loved that spoon.
I wish I could show it to you, but I can’t. The picture disappeared when I deleted my ex’s number. That was six years ago. I’m pretty sure he deleted mine, too. That’s probably why he emailed me last summer.
“Hope this email finds you well.”
That’s how it started, I’m not even kidding. You can measure out your life with coffee spoons and you can measure it by the way someone starts an email.
Hope this email finds you well puts an ocean of distance between you and the sender. It is leagues beyond Hope all is well. And miles to go from Hope you are doing well.
Hope this email finds you well is an opener forged at the slick desks of Human Resources or some other party too mindful of time to care about your wellbeing.
This wasn’t the first tone-deaf email he’d sent. One arrived on the first birthday of our breakup, though he didn’t acknowledge the occasion. He just said he was back in the city and would love to meet up, like we were old pals.
I wanted to reply, but more than that, I didn’t want to reply. So I didn’t.
A year later he wrote to tell me that someone we shared had overdosed and died. He thought I should know. I already did. I said I was sad to hear this but did not invite a response. He stopped emailing.
Years passed.
Sometimes I thought about the spoon. People have been thinking about spoons since before civilization. Spoons precede monogamy and the patriarchy. They drummed music, performed tricks, flirted with lovers and fed babies. The spoon has been stirred and balanced, collected and discarded. It ran away with the dish and bent in The Matrix. It melted and tunneled and helped the medicine go down. And we must never forget the spoons that sacrificed their lives under the weight of eager ice cream eaters.
There were other spoons, but I still thought about the yellow one. Sometimes, in a room of unusual spoons, I’d look for it.
We only lived together for one long winter. Before that, the spoon lived in my ex’s apartment. I thought that was okay. He liked the spoon, too. I think we both wanted a crime story to become a love story.
The man who used to say he loved me sent an email that found me well. And by that I mean it didn’t hit traffic bouncing between servers. It found me, and it excelled at finding me when I didn’t want to be found.
I was alone and unemployed on the side of a mountain. It was a vacation, so don’t worry about me. Let me worry about myself, which I was doing while confusing having a career with having a purpose. I was lost and desperate to escape being lost. I wanted to know where I was going.
“I’m reaching out as part of my 12 Steps,” the email said. “I’ve been sober for almost 3 years.”
I tried to imagine that.
On our first date, he knocked over a beer in a bar. While we searched for napkins, I laughed it off, but he got quiet and picked up shards in the dark. In his face, I saw a strain silence couldn’t hide, and for a while, I got high on cleaning up his mess.
I still drank too much, but he was into harder stuff. Pharmaceuticals mostly, and he could find anything, even when I hid it. When I refused to smuggle speed onto a train, he punished me with silence. I told him I loved him. He didn’t say it back.
We broke up. I threw a party just to not invite him. But we got back together. This time he convinced me Tinder was for finding friends. One new friend sat in my living room while I served her penne arrabiata.
By then, he was living with me and so was the spoon. We never used it for eating. Instead, we hung it over a doorway like a rare hunting trophy.
The man who emailed thanks me for what I did when we were together: finding him a therapist, refusing to use around him, and helping him write an apology to his parents.
This was true, but it was not the truth. I was not just “caring and helpful.” I was also angry, manipulated, ignored, jealous, desperate, ashamed, hopeful and hopeless.
“I’d love to talk on the phone to formally make amends if you’re open to it.”
When we broke up the last time, I kicked him out our apartment. I even packed his stuff. When I opened the wardrobe, his empty vodka bottles tumbled out. I let myself smell his t-shirt before shoving it into a bag. Then I yanked the spoon down from its prized position and placed it in a box.
I wanted to hate the spoon. I wanted to forget it. I pushed it away to reach the end of heartbreak as fast as possible. I thought if I followed a list of steps, I would get there.
When that didn’t work, I blamed him. I wanted him to say I deserved better. I wanted his remorse.
But that wasn’t in the email. The message was polite, detached and maybe bait. He thanked me for my time and asked for more of it. The subject line was (no subject). The parentheses curved like two spoons facing each other. Two spoons with no subject between them.
The gone years had shaped me. I lost a friend. I grieved estrangement with a parent. I left my career. I said goodbye to pets. I quit drinking. I made new friends. I met someone. I moved.
This is not a list. These did not happen step-by-step. They happened over and over and over again. I learned that letting go is not erasing. I learned that every relationship is a mirror.
A spoon can also be a mirror.
But usually, the image is blurry. It turns you upside down. The picture is an illusion.
The man in recovery wants to talk. “But simply no pressure.”
There’s always pressure, though, even for spoons. That’s how they’re made.
And when someone I shared a spoon with says he’s been sober for almost 3 years and asks for my support, I don’t just feel pressure. I feel relieved he’s trying. I feel anger that it’s all about his journey. I feel him packing me away, using me as invisible labor, customer support. I feel suspicious of being pulled back into what almost killed me.
So yeah, there’s pressure. Pressure to not derail the sober person. To say congratulations. To say anything. I feel the most pressure from myself.
Because there’s a part of me, not a big part but maybe a spoonful, that wants to ruin my peace. It tells me not to be selfish. To do one last good deed. It says I have nothing better to do. On the side of a mountain with no job and no plans, that spoonful is alive.
In 2014 psychologists from The University of Virginia conducted an experiment. They asked people to sit alone in a room for fifteen minutes. The participants had a choice: they could sit in stillness or press a button and give themselves an electric shock.
When I heard about this, my initial reaction was, I wonder what the shock feels like.
I’m not alone. Sixty-seven percent of men and twenty-five percent of women pressed the button. They would rather be electrocuted than be alone.
I’ve been shocked enough times to know how it feels. What I have not done enough is sit in my uncertain, boring life and explore what stillness has to offer me.
I avoid this because I believe there are only two choices: Escape with the press of a button or white-knuckle endurance. I forget, sometimes, about the secret third option.
The secret third option is to embrace stillness. Build a house there, buy a spoon and watch what happens. Because like the spoon, stillness is not one thing. It loosens its grip and settles around me until I don’t even want to press the button anymore.
Before the man who said no pressure pressed send, he typed, “sending my best!”
He sends his best, but that doesn’t mean it’s good enough for me.
What’s good for me is making amends with myself. These are not one-phone-call amends. I make them every day. It’s hard work, but don’t worry about me, and I won’t worry about the spoon.
Maybe it’s in a drawer or a collection or a landfill. I don’t need to know where the spoon lives. I don’t need to see it to know what’s real. Maybe there is no spoon, but I carry it with me.
Twenty Blocks is a series about birds, books, boxes and other objects that arrive uninvited with a piece of the puzzle.
A special thanks to Elizabeth Ellen, who published a version of “About a Spoon” in Hobart.