Like Honey – Anoushka Chauhan

The apricot jam and apple tart recipes

form our foundations—we didn’t inherit many

other love languages. Sometimes the sourdough is

too heavy for the container, the sugar and salt

outweigh the measuring spoon. I’m trying to tell you

that some loves outweigh the syntax of most languages.

When someone says home you think of a cold steak dinner

in a Walgreens parking lot, nights spent collecting glitter

dusted off birthday cards like we’re archeologists.

The glitter will outlive all our birthdays. I store it like a

time machine in a glass vial because I was too reckless then,

savoring dots of snowflakes on the tip of my tongue when

I should’ve caught it on film. The dust will outlive

the butterflies. Dawn will outrun dusk. We both

will outlive this week’s batch of jam. One of us will

outlive the other. Our apple tart recipes, the both of us.

Anoushka Chauhan is a law student writing from India. She likes owls, the color red, and the occasional Monty Python movie. Inspired by love, loss and personal experiences, her previous works have appeared in the Sublunary Review, the Sandy River Review, and the Raven Review.