Yo como tomates.

The past week, my husband has slept more than fourteen hours a day. I said nothing about it.

“They call it an episode,” he said.

Who they are, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Even if I did, I doubt he’d tell me.

Maybe he calls it an episode but wants the power of plural—they.

Today, as if nothing had happened this week, the light peeked around the earth and shone into our home—a missed companion we both liked.

Yes, today he made pasta. Sauce from scratch. Tomatoes plucked from the garden, still producing in October.

He laughed as I ate.

“You eat like a ravenous beast—or some jungle child raised by wolves.”

I have eaten this way my whole life.

Little echoes of childhood hunger reverberate even now. Reading all those etiquette books in high school did nothing.

Education can’t override instinct.

I eat like the feral cats I feed—touched by past hunger, possibly still harboring a belly full of worms. Each bite only half absorbed.

One of those cats must be outside; our dog barks at the front door.

He laughs again. I haven’t heard him laugh in a week.

I want some more.

“For a dog who doesn’t bark, she sure barks a lot,” he says.

It’s a joke. She’s a rescue from before we married. She didn’t bark before we moved in together—not even at the shelter, unlike the others.

As if my husband had given her permission to use her voice.

Now she barks.

I muse, “I wonder what her life was like before.”

Then I start to imagine: what would make a dog found wandering, pregnant, through the snow of rural Kentucky, not bark?

He interrupts my thoughts.

“It doesn’t matter what her life was like. Just what it is now.”

How I wish that were true.

But it isn’t. The past matters today.

It’s why a boy who was never safe enough to fall fully asleep grows into a man who sleeps so heavily—to keep the thoughts at bay for a week.

It’s why a girl who grew up so hungry can’t waste a second savoring a dinner so beautifully made by her husband.

It’s why a pregnant dog in Kentucky doesn’t bark until she meets these two.

I’ve been done eating fifteen minutes by the time he finishes.

“That was so good, babe,” I say. “I’m glad this episode has passed.”

I really mean it.