“Drunk at the Krazy Korner… girls dancing in bikinis?” – travel journal entry, New Orleans, LA – Day 7

Oh, the Onions!

These days I eat onions like they’re apples. I eat them on the subway, on buses, airplanes and even when I’m walking in the street. I always carry one with me, raw, red, de-skinned.

In bed, I eat them like oranges. I like to peel them while I’m already under the covers. Now the keyboard of my laptop smells like onion and every morning there is a pile of onion skin on my nightstand.

My friend says I crave onions because I have an overloaded liver. I tell her my liver is just fine and she insists I am an alcoholic.  I tell her maybe I am craving onions because I am pregnant, and she says maybe being pregnant would keep me from drinking.

She says it like a question, like she isn’t sure.

I tell her I don’t know how I could be pregnant because I haven’t slept with anybody for a very long time. She looks at me funny, and then I remember she was standing right next to me last weekend when that guy chatted me up.

He was a Japanese version of you. This may sound strange because he wasn’t technically Japanese. He kept handing me $9 hurricanes and I kept yelling different nationalities at him. I went through a random list of countries from the Middle and Far East. When I said “Japanese?” he leaned over and kissed me.

I don’t think it’s because of the drinking that I don’t remember him well. Rather, it’s because he was never really his own person. I just saw him as a shadow of you, a duplicate of sorts.

I don’t know if this will go on, and for how long. The thing with the onions, I mean, not seeing you in every man I meet.

I know what you’re thinking, though: “Oh, the onions!” you think, because you know I always have a glass of gin next to me when we talk on the phone; because you know I meet men, and I take them home sometimes even if I don’t particularly feel like it.

But know this: They’re sweet onions, not the aggressive type. They peel easily. The juice between the layers is clear and creamy and feels like water on my tongue, and the flesh is crunchy and tender at the same time.

My friend says I shouldn’t fool myself and hands me both a brochure on birth control and one of an alcoholism treatment facility.

But know this: he was just like you, in an exotic shell – slightly darker, shinier hair that looked almost purple. Blue eyes. A tan. A strange-looking passport tucked in the left shirt pocket.

So if you see me with him sometime, don’t feel flattered. And when I cry on the street sometimes, don’t think it’s because of the onions.