Valentine's Day Massacre
Stop yourself to ask: should you be cooking this chicken at all?
Alexa, play “We Are Young” by fun. because we are young.
My friend texted me last night while she was watching This Is Us, which is an unfortunate way to spend an evening, but she doesn’t judge my religion, so I don’t judge hers. An absolute television die-hard, she’s insistent that I get back into the melodrama of Mandy Moore’s perpetual death. I refuse. Partly because the self-recorded videos she sends from her couch with added commentary are better than the show. Partly because I needed to distance myself from the series after I dressed up as old Mandy Moore for a Halloween party in Bushwick where no one else dressed up. That is a different story for a different time.
Tonight on the show, Justin Hartley was talking to some blonde woman and the blonde woman said, “I couldn’t believe it that we could be at the right place, at the right time…” My friend Nam Phuong interrupted to say, “I’ve said this before!” The blonde woman continued, “And that I would be the best version of myself.” Nam screamed out, “I’m a genius!” I have no context as to what was happening, but I know the conversation she was referencing.
My senior year of college, I dated a freshman. It was a tragedy. We dated fast and we dated hard, and after about four months, we crashed just as triumphantly. I was in the midst of applying for grad schools, and the fatalistic conversations about our relationship had already started. He told me that if I went anywhere that wasn’t local, we wouldn’t stay together. True to my raising, I believed this could be remedied with food. After a bout of arguments on Valentine’s Day, I decided that I would make him my fried chicken. Made from a secret combination of flour, cornstarch, garlic salt, cayenne, paprika, and black pepper, if there were ever a dish that could make a man stay, it’s my fried chicken. I have evidence to support it. I went to the grocery store on my meager college budget and got all the ingredients to make my prized dish, alongside mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. I don’t believe in astrology or Tarot cards, but I do believe in the magic of food—my boyfriend did not.
Hindsight suggests that I was engaging in a practice I’ve come to perfect over the years: avoiding the prospect of looming change by creating smaller crises. I knew that I had to leave Tennessee. I knew that it would be the hardest decision I would make up to that point in my life. So instead, I dated a freshman and bound myself to that decision like he was the indisputable love of my life. On Valentine’s Day, he came over, stayed for about 30 minutes and a glass of boxed wine, picked around the food, and left 75 percent of it behind before going back to his dorm to study. I cried and cried. Cried way harder than anyone should over a plate of chicken, and eventually, Nam Phuong stopped into my dorm and asked what was wrong with me. Point of clarification: There is a stark difference between someone asking what is wrong and someone asking what is wrong with you. Nam Phuong was asking the latter.
I think I was raised, incidentally, to believe that change is a luxury of a certain few. It’s a misguided idea that most of us remain relatively unchanged through life. For me, it was easier to focus on this doomed relationship—specifically, this uneaten fried chicken dinner—than it was for me to look ahead, swallow the knot in my throat, and prepare for what was to come. Nam Phuong walked up to me, picked up a piece of chicken off the plate with her hands, took a bite, and said, “This is sad, Justin.” She looked out the giant window that I used to smoke secret cigarettes out of, shook her head, and then she took another bite. After she finished the chicken (monstrous, but admirable move), she said, “Let’s go smoke a cigarette.”
Crouched on the steps of our dorm, she handed me a Camel Crush and started in. “You remember Dillon? We broke up freshman year,” she said, taking a drag off her cigarette. “It’s not because I didn’t love him, but because it wasn’t right. You need three things: the right time, the right place, and the right person.” Nam Phuong, never one for patience, immediately followed that up with, “Do you get it? We didn’t have the first two.” Also not one to see if I’ve learned the lesson, she looked out on the parking lot and carried on. “I don’t think you have any of them,” turning back to me, matter of factly. “But I don’t think that’s bad. It’s just what it is.”
I thought she was wrong, but my boyfriend and I broke up two months later after I got accepted into Georgetown on my birthday. I met my partner of seven years after I moved to Washington. Nam Phuong and Dillon, ten years later, have moved in together.
Did This Is Us rip Nam Phuong off? Possibly. Probably not, but possibly. But what I’ve come to realize is that the academic-level rhetoric of This Is Us, which may feel vaguely cliché, feels very relationship-centric, but it’s not. I didn’t fall out of love with my boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. Or my birthday. Nor do I think I found my partner because of some great algorithm. But that day, I was not in the right time. Nor the right place, and I certainly wasn’t the right person. How can you expect anything good to come of that?
No person deserved my chicken in that moment. Not him and not me. Maybe Nam Phuong, but no one else. But in pursuit of getting it right—the person and the time and the place—we cook chicken for people who don’t fully know how to love us. Sometimes, that includes ourselves. In fairness to everyone involved, the right move sometimes is to call it. To take two steps back and realize that none of these things that felt reasonable work together. None of these things are worth salvaging, at least for the time being.
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