Life is donuts

Loving them too much is no reason not to eat them

“A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” That’s what I hear in my head when I look at a donut.

I love donuts. No, I mean I fuuuucking love them. I love them so much that I almost never eat them. Not because I am into self-denial or follow a super strict diet—I eat some kind of junk food every single day. But I rarely eat a donut because it’s always over way, way too quickly and what I’m left with is not satisfaction but its opposite, a freshly poked bear of a craving. More, more, more. Not enough! It’s never enough, not even close.

A donut is almost not even a real thing to me. It’s a twenty-second experience. Of crunchy sugar, hints of cinnamon, a soft crumb, a sticky glaze. And then just as it’s getting going, it’s over.

I mean, come on, what a tease.

Anyway, the other day it occurred to me that maybe everything is donuts. Life’s not really made up of things, not of people or places, but experiences of things, people, and places. Some donuts last just twenty seconds before they are gone forever. Some last sixty-five years. But every single one of them—the people, places, things—will one day be just a mental imprint of cinnamon breath and a sticky lip.

I’ve been petsitting in this big country house in Wiltshire for twenty-one days now. This donut tastes like rubber boots and green fields. Like a giant marble kitchen island and a stocked pantry. Like windowsills deep enough to sit in. It tastes like the company of three fluffy dogs who seem to love me back.

When I got here, I thought, mmm, a whole month in this lovely space. I tried to measure it with my imagination and I thought: Not enough! I wish I could stay here longer... How long exactly, I don’t know. And what does it matter how many days, how many months? I’m here now. And when I leave, I will take it with me in my bones.

Not counting the day of my departure, I have four days left. Four days. Pfft, what does that mean? What does four days feel like? I have no sense of it at all.

What I do have a sense of: this soft armchair, which I’m glad I dragged over to the big accordion glass doors that are now wide open on the green field, the freshly baled hay. This warm animal named Lola softly leaning into my left hip. This cool evening air and the dying light of what was once a sweltering summer day. (How long ago was that? An hour? Ten years?) It’s just me here, and this donut I’m eating right now. A moment on the lips.

xo