When I eat Eggs Benedict the soft, runny, and slightly sour richness it offers to my tongue, throat, and stomach, wraps itself around my waist and doesn’t want to let go. I’m hers until she’s ready to release me back into the quotidian golden morning sunlight dripping through the afternoon into its own version of Heaven the way these words have tried to. That comparing of a food I love to an idealized version of intimacy with a woman is all fine and good, I say.

But when I’m in front of an actual woman I want and looking into her muffin eyes for that buttery sense of home-spun introspection and personality I can never get enough of, she often looks nothing like Eggs Benedict and often is clothed in something resembling a worsted Christmas stocking or a nappy cat toy with a bell hanging off it. I want to drizzle down off my multilayered self like a wish to be luscious with bad taste all at once, or maybe I want to be swatted at by my own attention span the way my cats suddenly went after my ankles when I was spending too much time with my back to them washing the dishes, some of them theirs.

It’s not just that I objectify what I crave, women, being one of them. It’s that I need to know when they decide to leave, I’ll still have something unctuous inside me to sink my teeth into. I get it that that’s a lot different than the gamble of growing up and settling down and being committed to a relationship in the conventional sense. Having married once I’ve since learned I don’t have the patience for that. I have about 6 hours of it in me on a good day, and that’s providing it’s not poked by someone with a forked tongue and my ego doesn’t bleed yellow. But I’ve never been lonely, even when I was sure I was, because my tears that would start to slowly run down my Canadian bacon-shaped cheeks whenever I permitted myself to think I’d never find love again, often tasted like saffron, with a kiss of lemon.