I know my "roommates" by their eggs

Each different way of preparing eggs, each series of steps to eat them (or not eat them), reveals characteristic features of people.

Edouard ate them almost raw, oeufs à la coque. He dipped a small piece of baguette in the yolk or sipped it with a teaspoon. Lina ate them burned, she doesn’t cook very well. Felix ate mine, that stingy son of a bitch; To top it off, I was frying them in almost a pool of oil — my oil — so they looked like submerged eggs rather than starry ones. Santiago made a single egg every morning, in a special pan that accommodated that small portion. Thus accompanied the quinoa that had been boiling the night before, a healthy, bland and boring porridge.

Clemencia had an egg: she would plant herself in the kitchen when the guards had already gone to bed and the bus drivers had not gotten up yet, with a 3:30 a.m. insomnia, and she would start to stir some tender eggs that flooded our little apartment with the hazelnut smell of butter, inducing obscene dreams or waking me up in anguish by sudden hunger.

I don’t remember Mathilde’s eggs, but I suppose they were as good as anything she cooked. Mathilde read the Tarot de Marseille, where she too came from, and her friends sometimes met in our living room to have fate peeled from them. I think my friend cooked hers in secret, like the Easter eggs that are hidden in the Marseille deck: visible only to the expert eyes of those who scrutinize the arcana. I know, however, that the priestess figure has one on her left side. The memory of Mathilde would remain on my right side even if today I discovered that she did not like eggs.

Juan Manuel did not eat them because he was a vegetarian. It ran in the family: when I was children, when I stayed at their house, they made us tofu “parakeets”, that is, a scramble with onion and tomato poached in butter, and I thought that soy was a delicious replacement. But as adults, living with the best childhood friend did not work and at some point the rotten egg burst.

I never lived with M because we believed that our relationship would not support living together, but I spent the better part of a decade by his side. At the end of that time, she had become a bodybuilder and preferred to deye egg the eggs she prepared at home. In the end, to avoid wasting time collecting yolks and discarding them in the trash, she started buying some boxes of egg whites that I disliked just thinking about them. I say think about them, because I never had to taste that albumin abomination. M never removed the yolks from the eggs that I served him for breakfast when he spent the night with me. Whatever I prepared, she ate it with praise and willingness. M always made exceptions for me, accepting in his own way how little or how much I could give him. Eggs with yolk and everything.

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Last year I boiled two eggs every morning for 184 days, making slight modifications to find the consistency that I liked best. I did not achieve perfection, which is an elusive notion, but I did achieve various measures of imperfection that satisfied me in their own way. The experiment did not produce the annoyance that I anticipated, so I continue to consume eggs in a regular and disciplined way. Since every day of my life I have eaten two eggs, I could venture to calculate time with an oviparous calendar instead of the Julian one: I am 21,900 eggs old, because I just turned thirty.

My next waste heat will be an egg development. A story about political campaigns on the coast, Sucre factories in Bogotá, poems dedicated to fried foods and a little known Maghreb ancestor of the queen of them all: the arepa ‘e egg.