the time it takes

Clearly, I never followed up on the post I threw up here in July. Life has been a whirlwind, but for the first time in half a decade, I can honestly say things are okay—more than okay. I might be tempting fate by admitting it, but it’s true. Sid has settled into a new school in a small city nearby and commutes by train each day. Emmett started middle school and is thriving. And I began teaching at a new school that already feels like a tight-knit community. It’s been a learning curve, but one I expected—and welcomed.

This summer, I spent a lot of time working on personal things, the threads of which I’m still untangling, slowly. I’m realizing that ghosts, no matter how old, never truly vanish. They fade into the background but still tap you on the shoulder—or, sometimes, knock you down—despite their wispy, amorphous state. Memories are like time itself: fluid yet concrete, always there, moving with you—or through you.

A few nights ago, I was making dinner. It was early evening, and the darkness of late fall had already settled in. It was Monday, and I was preparing our weekly chopped salad. I deconstruct it so everyone in the family has a better chance of eating it—a dish my husband and I have been making since the earliest days of our relationship. It’s just vegetables and lemon-oil-marinated chickpeas, served with flatbread, hard-boiled eggs, and hummus, but it feels as comforting as meatballs and spaghetti on a cold winter night.

We have this chopper-thingy I bought a few years ago. It looks like a box grater—you place the vegetables on top and press down a bladed grid, which chops them into perfect cubes. This $20 gadget has brought me so much joy. Maybe you understand the satisfaction of uniformly cubed veggies. For me, it’s immensely gratifying. Or it was, until last Monday.

I put a carrot in, pushed down, and the entire blade system got stuck. Instead of opening the chopper and removing the carrots—clearly too thick and fibrous—I kept pounding on it. Again and again, I slammed the top with my palm until the pain in my hand turned to numbness, radiating to my fingers, wrist, and forearm. When that didn’t work, I looked around for something heavier to help. That damn motherfucking carrot needed to be chopped. It had to transform from its natural state into something uniform, something under my control. For a brief moment, I completely lost it.

I must’ve been making quite the racket. The dog hid under the kitchen table. Emmett came up from his video game lair in the basement to investigate. “Mom, why don’t you just take the carrots out and cut them?” he asked. Logical, of course. But at that moment? Impossible. After he left the room, I hugged myself, cradled my throbbing hand, and began to cry.

I thought about ghosts, about how the past, though it belongs to another time, can still feel so immediate. I reflected on my stubbornness over the stupid carrot, my desperation to transform it into something it wasn’t meant to be. The carrot wasn’t supposed to shed its form easily. It didn’t need to. A carrot tastes like a carrot no matter how it’s sliced. But ghosts—and perfectionism—don’t follow logic. My need to follow through on a pointless process overpowered my ability to think clearly. My response? To beat the hell out of an inanimate object and nearly break my hand.

Instead, I broke the chopper. I spent twenty minutes trying to pry the half-chopped carrot out of the blades with no success. My irrational boxing match had bent the metal. In my attempt to force the carrot into neat, uniform pieces, I destroyed the tool meant to process it.

When the tears stopped and the throbbing in my hand subsided, I tossed the broken chopper in the garbage and picked up a simple knife to finish the salad. And then, unexpectedly, I started laughing. The tantrum had been absurd—but it also made sense. You can’t force everything, especially not nature. Not everything fits into neat cubes or makes sense. Life is messy. Meaning is messy. Feelings don’t conform. And when you try to suppress them until they reach a breaking point, you end up beating up a vegetable chopper – and yourself.