May 28

It’s 8 pm, and there is a cake on the kitchen table. I am licking beaters covered in butterscotch icing. Kir is at the table, mixing cocoa powder and flour. He’s making me a second cake. The first cake is for me to take to the office. The second is for my birthday gathering tomorrow night.

I spend three hours there on the couch, watching Kir bake and ice my cakes. He gives me spoons and bowls and beaters to lick. I lick the beaters (a beater and a half, actually, he reserves half a beater for himself) clean of icing, or white chocolate, of cake batter. I think about how much butter I am consuming, and giggle.

Kir gets a little nervous, at first. I am just sitting on the couch, watching and talking to him. I am not reading or surfing the internet. The TV is off. It’s rare for me to just sit like that. He will not let me help with the cakes. You’re not supposed to make your own birthday cake. He won’t even let me help with the dishes. Much later, he will allow me to dry things as he finishes washing.

Eventually I put on music. First Bruce Springsteen, but that’s not right. I find one of my favorite albums of all time, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After. It is an album so melancholy that I no longer listen to it alone. I only listen with Kir there, to protect me from the sadness. We used to listen to this album in Iowa, almost four years ago, lying naked on an air mattress, drenched in sweat as the air conditioner labored.

(I was not allowed to listen to Counting Crows my sophomore year of college. My roommate found it whiny.)

So we listen to this album, and Kir sings along with it, from time to time so do I. Eventually, the cake has been baked and cooled. Both cakes have been frosted. The chocolate cake with white chocolate icing looks good, really good. A proper grownup cake, as Kir says. The butterscotch cake looks a little funny. It’s lumpy, somehow. We cover it in coconut and put it on a pretty plate. It can now be taken to my office without embarrassment.

We carry the cakes upstairs with us when we go to bed, so they can spend the night in the air conditioning and the frosting will not overheat and melt. They sit on the dresser, and I fall asleep smelling sugar, entangled with Kir, thinking about love.

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.