A couple weeks ago I stole some sage from the herb garden of a house I’m working on. No harm, no foul; the owners are gone until the spring. I took it for one particular meal, butternut and goat cheese pizza, which I ate last week.

Tonight I took most of the rest of the butternut, and roasted it in the oven with onions, and carrots that I bought in August with a promise to eat healthier, leaner, and because they hold for months when I forget about them in the fridge, with a little bit of the sage.

Yesterday I drank a cup of coffee at 4PM. Like a bag of carrots, the promise was to stay up writing a chapter of a novel. Instead I drank singani, wrote a silly list, and my steam ran out. I ate a melatonin gummy, and the caffeine grew roots on my mind all night. yada yada yada, my jawbones ached all day.

While the carrots and squash were sizzling, I boiled water and cut chicken. I emptied a package of gnocchi into the water, sauteed the chicken until just so, as the gnocchi began to surface.

Last night I heard a guy read a poem, which he had timed perfectly to “Coming in the Air Tonight.” Another read “City Song,” lines drumming a rhythm with twisted repetition. This was part of the cocktail. I arrived at the open mic tired, reluctant, and I left buzzing from coffee and poems and connection.

With the gnocchi in the colander in the sink, and the chicken on the cold back burner, and the pan of vegetables pulled from the oven, I browned bread crumbs in the still-hot oven and melted butter in the still-hot saucepan, sprinkled sage as the butter foamed.

I ran out of steam to write the novel, but I also had an existential crisis. I’m a terrifically slow writer–at least of fiction. Maybe poetry, too, I don’t know; when it’s 4 or 8 or even 20 lines, even a slow chug is quick progress. I seem to be moving while writing this? And the story’s not there, not exactly. I can talk about the story I want to tell, and it makes sense, but when I’m writing I can’t get the scale consistent. This portion over here should be slowed way down, I’m skipping over the substance like a rock on a pond. But is there substance? What if the substance has no space between its atoms, has no movement in its molecules?

I wasn’t going to, I had thought the butternuts and carrots would be a side, but when stirred the gnocchi and the chicken together, they needed more color, and besides, the vegetables were jealous of the browned butter and crisped sage bath the chicken and gnocchi were about to receive.

Could I be a novelist? Isn’t this situation exactly what I wanted to overcome by writing a novel, to trust that I’m going to “waste” time, that I will write thousands of words for every word kept in the end, that the story I sketched out is not the story that will be told. That I have to do it, whether I’m hungover from last night’s poetry and coffee or not, whether there is steam in my boiler or not, whether it’s coming (in the air tonight) like a crowd, or pulling teeth from my clenched jaws.

I poured the butter and sage over the contents of the cast iron pan, and stirred, spooned some out into a bowl and sprinkled crunchy bread crumbs on top.

It was then that I remembered I have been a farmer once. I seeded and transplanted; every afternoon, then, in the dust and humidity and heat, I grew blisters into callouses, dancing the hoe across each bed, and in the mornings scratching my arms with zucchini vines, greening my hands with tomato leaves, filling bags of arugula and dipping lettuce in chilly well water.

And in the evenings, in the evenings, slicing it all into hot pans, letting it char, just a shade.

I once was a farmer. I once was a chef. I once was a poet. I once was a lover. I once was a man. Once I danced, once I ate, once I drank. Once I looked at stars, smoking a cigarette, counting meteors.

I could be, once more.

Novelist or not.