Best Paired with: a gallon of fear and a sliver of courage

 

Cook time: the next six months (trust me, it's worth it.)

 

Wet Ingredients: 1 year of unbelief, a splash of "maybe" (squashed by unbelief), a dash of indecisiveness, 10 kg of insecurity, 3 months of sleepless nights, 1 disastrous situationship (from said insecurity), 1 last straw, prayer (optional but really, there's no limit), dumb luck  

 

Dry Ingredients: 1 acceptance letter, 50 exploding group chats, 6 more months of slog, 1 long packing list, 12 trips to Uniqlo (to enhance frustration), 4 farewells, 1 week of nightmares, prayer (again, there's no limit), a father's tears, a single one-way flight

 

Instructions — Making a Blue Moon is extremely difficult, or it can be extremely easy. It all depends on you. It takes time, and so much (so much) chance. But you start with what you have, and sometimes it starts from unbelief. But I assure you we will get there together.

 

Mix the first 4 dry ingredients in a large bowl to produce numbness, make sure you pound it, really put your weight into it. Combine 1 disastrous situationship and 3 months of sleepless nights until you can't tell the difference between the two. Add your last straw in and a generous helping of prayer and luck. 

 

Combine first 3 wet ingredients and ponder if this was the right choice. Mull over packing list. Pour Uniqlo trips in, which may produce debt (prayer and providence should settle it). Dump farewells and everything should start feeling like a blur, components should start combining faster. Mix with 1 week of nightmares, a father's tears and season with 1 single one-way flight.

 

Mix wet and dry ingredients and fold until evenly combined. It should look (and taste) like fatigue. And that's what this is, it's layered despair mixed with fear, and what we have in our mixing bowl is heavy, dense fatigue. Because sometimes all it takes for one blue moon is the weight of the world in your hands. And all you can do is shape it.

 

Shape it as you would a map, like how an explorer charts the world before seeing it. He imagines and crafts it into fact onto paper, as if he knows exactly what lies beyond the great ocean. So feel it with your hands and shape it into a moon. Because all you have known is despair and that gripping fear that all you are is all you ever will be.

 

Let it rest for 15 hours. Preheat the oven and place your moon in. Here's the hardest part, the waiting. Your hands still feel heavy from moulding all that fatigue so you rest them on your knees and turn your palms upward like you're waiting for a sign from God, His assurance that this blue moon will be worth the wait.

 

You whisper a prayer as you step off the plane, God, I need this blue moon to work. That even if I come home with my hands empty and my feet blistered, at least I'll have a story to tell. I just need some magic to last the next 6 months, to heal the pain of the last 6 months.

 

And like a miracle, your moon will rise, slowly as toenails do. You're at the mercy of time, it's the first time you've allowed yourself to breathe. Like really, truly, breathe. 

 

Unsurprisingly of course, you fail. And who could blame you? You've never allowed yourself to be alone in the kitchen. Just you and the whirring of the oven fan. What the hell am I doing? 

 

So you do what any professional chef does, you dig through your pantry and snack on hope.

 

Hope comes in shiny baggies, crunchy and satisfyingly salty. You hadn't realised how hungry you are, how hungry you've been. You eat and eat, filling your stomach of nerves churning for a blue moon wish. A ridiculous race to fill yourself. Until your fingers catch stray salt and that's when you panic. 

 

The baggies are empty, and you're being forced to go cold turkey. The moon is as it was weeks ago and worse, it seems to be deflating. 

 

To hell with recipes! You reach out and save your moon from the godforsaken oven. What was once palm sized has shrunken into a sticky tennis ball. In a blind panic, you craft a new (and unrecommended) plan. 

 

Ingredients: Facetime from parents, 200 unopened chats, 8 daily reminders to go outside, 10 hours of sleep, 4 (failed) attempts to drag yourself to a museum (any museum), 1 list of unexplored (and probably overpriced) cafes, 3 hours on Skyscanner, 1 free trial for contact lenses, innumerable disappointing hikes to Urban Outfitters, 5 new eyeshadows. 

 

Instructions — Ignore first three ingredients. Smush 10 hours of sleep and museum attempts in a bowl. It should have the consistency of slush, utter confusion, completely shapeless. Toss cafe list and Skyscanner hours. Churn in the free trial and Urban Outfitter hikes. The mixture should start to feel brick solid. Your spatula may break while you're mixing, think nothing of it and find a new one. Mix until you can't push the spatula anymore. Claw out the mixture and incorporate eyeshadow colouring, until it's a somewhat sickly blue. Bury tennis ball-moon in mixture.

 

It still looks like a moon, right? Kind of? 

 

With crossed fingers you place it back into the oven, safe and warm and tucked in. 

 

It feels worse this time. You know something is wrong. It's the way it felt when you held your new Frankenstein in your shaking hands. You swallow the sour taste in the back of your throat and pull up a chair. 

 

You wait for months and realise you've been counting backwards. The kitchen is dim and quiet, the only light in the room is the oven's glow. You don't even remember when and why you started this charade. The huge mass in the oven hasn't changed at all. You smell like time grown cold in a stranger's kitchen. And all you want to do is unplug the oven, serve your excuse of a moon and wash it down with a glass of expected disappointment. 

 

Dawn enters without warning, sunlight trickling in. Right there and then you see it, all of it. They bloom across the wall like ivy. Hundreds and hundreds of blue moon recipes, lists of measured ingredients, messy diagrams of the same sphere, reimagined a thousand times. The recipes are pockmarked with red crosses and angry question marks, this isn't the first time. 

 

It hits you like a baseball pitch, and you let out a scream. You hear a plane taking off and your mother taking dinner off the stove a thousand miles away. A child pries a cocoon open, helping a butterfly out as it dies in his hands, its wings lifelessly still. 

 

You collapse to the floor, exhausted. I never should have started, I'm flailing, I'm failing, I — Your recipe falls into your hands from the worktable, and something catches your eye. 

 

Start with what you have. Start with what you had. 

 

You take the mass out of the oven. With trembling hands, you start unwrapping your mistake. It comes off like a plaster, taking bits of flesh as it goes. The moon is burning so you tear faster, your hands are blister red. It comes in ugly sobs; you hadn't realised how desperate you were and how sorry you are. When it's finally done the moon is a golf ball, small and shiny in the oven's glow. Soundlessly, you reach for a baking tray, slide it into the oven and gently close the door. 

 

Morning is here, and for the first time in a long time, you breathe. The moon is in the oven and the sun is on your face. Your hands aren't shaking when you turn the knob and walk out the kitchen. 

 

A moon is rising in the oven, slowly as toenails do. The oven's glow turns blue and the timer rings, like a bell I've been waiting to hear.