How to Love an Onion

by Aimee Herman

We became onions. Paper skin peeling, revealing the spicy and emotional. Peeling, away.

I knew it was over by the way she started to kiss me. She used to treat my mouth like a rest stop. She’d park her tongue between my lips for hours. Seizure it around, clean my teeth, zigzag from cheek to cheek, waterslide down my throat. Her kisses were like a season pass to Great Adventure. Like a round trip on the Gravitron. Tilt-A-Whirl. Funnel cake. Ferris wheel. Loaded french fries with curious cheese and imitation bacon. This was her kiss.

“When we become the cause of each other’s indigestion is when we must end it. Okay?” she said at the beginning. “You grab for a Tums or an Alka-Seltzer and I’m out.” But when she said this, we were swallowing each other whole without chewing. There was no such thing as “end.” This was the time when we could talk about her previous sex life and I’d laugh, even ask questions. Jealousy hadn’t yet barged in. This was when she told me about all the times she was paid for it and the few times she paid others. It all just added to her intrigue. Her shine.

An onion’s close relatives are the scallion (green onion), shallot, garlic, leek. They may be eaten raw (see: salads and double dares), but they do their best work when seasoning (see: tomato sauce and fingertips). The onion recently celebrated its seven-thousandth birthday (give or take). On our eleventh date, Goldust snuck an onion in her pocket. In the dark, we sat together watching a film I cannot remember. I recall the sound of her biting into it as though it were simple like an apple.

I knew it was over when our mouths became like cemetery dust storms. Funerals. Women coated in black fabrics, hunched over, too preoccupied about salted meat platters and towers of stale Italian cookies to properly mourn.

There is a word for all of this. What became of us. 

Goldust and I were breaking up.

“You’ve become so binary,” she said to me. “Boy or girl. Good or bad. Loved or un. There’s space living between all that which you just ignore. You don’t see it, that’s your problem. But we were there, together, you and I. We lived in the in-between. Lived.”

“Well, I disagree. And anyway, this is your home,” I said. “I am your home.” I thought this was a good enough argument.

“This was my home. But I need to head back north for a while. Be in the wild. Hunt for my food. Bury parts of myself that are rotting . . .” 

“North? Like Vermont? Maine? Edmonton?”

“The Bronx,” she answered.

“But I still have words I never got to use, never got to tell you. I hid a letter beneath my kneecap for you! It’s been giving me paper cuts with each step, but I’ve been waiting for the right time to—”

“Keep it. Keep all your words,” she said, grabbing my hands in hers. “Just cross out my name and replace it with the next one. Otherwise, if you use them on me, they will be used goods. They’ll be thrift store rather than Macy’s with the tag still on.”

Goldust was a bay leaf. I still didn’t know how but she flavored everything around me.

There are yellow onions and red (sometimes referred to as purple). Vidalia and Walla Walla are the sweetest. You could just bite right into one of those like an apple. But even the sweetest of things will still make you cry.

“Listen,” she said, letting go of my hands as if they were burning her flesh. “I hid a family of spiders—daddy longlegs, his male partner, and their adopted kids—somewhere in this apartment. I taught them some English and a few verbs in Portuguese. When you find them, they have been instructed to tell you stories to put you to sleep at night. I know how much you struggle with the night. And I also hid a recipe of the stew you like. The one you make for me. I cut open the mattress and slipped it in. It may have shifted from . . . you know . . . us. You can leave it in there if you’d like. And . . .” She paused for a long enough time, and I worried she had frozen or I had or time had stopped somehow. “And I made a batch of that stew and threw your favorite sweater in there. What do you call that? Marinate?”

“You cooked my sweater in beef stew?”

“I should go.”

Onions are made up of 89% water. Plus sugar and carbs and a pinch of protein. They are like magic fairy dust, making the mildest and most boring of recipes come alive. When Goldust left, seven thousand and two hundred of my taste buds disappeared. All I could taste was the tar left over from that time I smoked a cigarette when I was twelve.

Onions can be diced, quartered, sliced into rings, fried, sautéed, ground up, broiled. When Goldust and I made love, the space around us smelled like onions. The entire apartment reeked as though we had been cooking them for days. Or months. Even years, maybe.

Published January 22nd, 2023