Onions
By Riley Nowak
You promise yourself you’ll stop falling in love.
You’re in a cramped farmhouse kitchen, sweltering and stuffy. Everything smells like onion. She talks about cooking. Her knife snicks precisely through an onion. She talks about her grandmother. Her laugh fires an arrow that thwips precisely through your heart. There’s too much soup in the pot for the two of you.
Your senses forget themselves. Weeks later you’ll have to pull over when they remember.
You’ll fall out of love at the side of the road as all the butterflies flee your stomach.
You promise yourself you’ll stop falling in love.
Riley Nowak (they/them) is a queer, disabled author based in Nova Scotia. When they aren't writing you can find them daylighting as a software developer and pretending not to have a cat allergy.
I love how falling in love here feels less like a choice and more like a mild accident involving onions, soup, and poor judgement. It’s funny, tender, and painfully accurate in the way it treats romance as something you swear off repeatedly… and then do anyway.
Nice one!!