You know what sucks when your mom cooks really well? That there comes a day when she doesn’t wake up, because her heart simply stopped beating while she was sleeping and suddenly you are faced with the real world and holy fuck the real world tastes rotten.

Joey’s friends tease him about taking the longest time to order food but they simply don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a house that is filled with flavors and smells and a kitchen that is crammed with food and laughter in every corner. They don’t know what it’s like to ask your mother for lobster for dinner and come home from school and sure enough, there was lobster on the table. Not actual lobster because his mother said they didn’t have any at the fishmonger’s, but it was the most delicious, lobster-shaped red velvet cake. And it was more than enough.

The day his mother passed away Joey was first surrounded by a black cloud of disbelief and then he fell into an abyss of sadness and desperation. It was the first time in his life that a whole day went by without eating anything. He was just curled up in his bed, his pillow on top of his head, silently crying. The day after, his father almost had to drag him out of the bedroom. He had to eat something. He went to the kitchen. It was excruciating to enter his mother’s kingdom. A fleeting thought that they should bury her in the kitchen went through his mind and for a second he felt he was going insane but that’s when he saw it.

There was a pot on the stove with the food his mother had prepared before she died. Beef and potatoes with bay leaves, tomato, oregano, pepper and a tiny bit of chili. “To funk it up!”, she used to say. There was marble cake on the table, safely enclosed in her beloved purple Tupperware. “What an invention!”, she said the first day she bought it and brought it home with him, giggling and squeezing his hand twice, like she always did when she was excited. There was lemonade and jam in the fridge she had made just 2 weeks ago with the lemons and figs they picked together. There were meatballs, moussaka and lasagna in the freezer, waiting to go in the oven on a busy day.

For the next three months he would carefully eat his mother’s food, minding not to waste a single crumb. The last thing to finish was her lemonade and that last gulp was the bitterest thing he had ever tasted. As soon as he put the empty glass in the sink, the emptiness of his life without his mother hit him hard like a tsunami wave, the depression reaching deep into the ocean of his psyche. He was lost. And hungry for his mother’s unconditional love.

He woke up on the sofa the next day. The smell from the basil on the windowsill felt like the kitchen was saying “good morning”. He was determined to taste his mother’s food again. Where’s her apron?