Muffins & Grief
I got so distracted selecting a vegetable oil substitute that I completely forgot to mix the poppyseeds into my poppyseed muffins. I've been looking forward to them all week.
Dear Missing Ingredient Muffins,
Perhaps you are meant to take a drug test later and the poppyseed absence is a blessing from the universe. But forgive me for attempting to read the positive in a situation of depletion. But hear me out, what if, just what if, the universe really is pulling for us. What if we believed that, all evidence to the contrary. We could live this way. We could rejoice over the missed poppyseeds and the spilled milk and the lost ring. But of course to fully rejoice we must fully grieve. Perhaps every occasion is a moment for deep grief and also deep gratitude. Perhaps you aren’t upset enough about the poppyseeds. Perhaps you aren’t enraptured in joy enough for the muffins and what they are lacking. Perhaps we have all gotten a little stunted at both ends. We can’t numb selectively. So if you can’t throw yourself onto the chase lounge in tears over the missed poppyseeds then how can you shout in joy the next time a pastry arrives to you with everything exactly in it that you need and want? Let them call us dramatic. Often we wonder, am I happy? Am I happy enough? When how can we be if we don’t let ourselves marvel at the absolute sadness that arrives for us each day? The forgotten poppyseeds remind us that we can lose what we most treasure and still live—which is horrible news really when you’ve lost something you can’t live without because there you go on living. There you go on living having lost and wept and anguished and raged and the muffin can still be good, even though it is missing its namesake. It makes no sense.
Or maybe it just all means we are often worried about the wrong thing. Maybe if we had just used the vegetable oil and not gone seeking we would have found what we truly needed all along. Or perhaps I am making too much meaning of it all. But it does mean something, each and every complaint, because it is the recipe for our concoctions of joy and too of grief.
—with love and mercy for what has been missed and what will be found,
The Complaint Department