My first culinary love was and will always be Anthony Bourdain. I discovered him when I was twelve years old on the Travel and Living channel that I watched on the old television set in my parents’ room. It began as an after-school ritual: return from school, make a snack and watch him have adventures all around the world. He was often nursing a hangover, always sharp and dressed in a leather jacket, sunglasses, gel in his hair and a cigarette in his hand, eating and telling stories that I could only dream about. 

The following year at the start of middle school, I was diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune illness that forced me to spend months in bed in front of the tv and quit nearly all the foods that I was not only used to but that I craved. My lonely periods of different diets, which sometimes meant long months of fasting and only drinking a protein smoothie that was supposed to be sweet but tasted salty and aggressive, were tolerable because I felt accompanied by Tony, the name I started calling him around this time. He had adventures and ate the things that I couldn’t and held my hand through the darkness and uncertainty. A tv crush is like any other crush, a crutch and obsession. 

I started eating normal again — at least what I would consider normal — after I ended up hospitalized for being underweight. I was dehydrated and passed out after lifting my arms. After a month they gave me a free card to feed myself again, which opened up a new door and changed my life. At the hospital, my friends brought me food and books by Tony. As the years passed, I learned more about myself, gathered new tools and had more autonomy (and intuition) about my life, my body and what I consumed. 

I was in Florence the day that Tony died. It ultimately felt serendipitous to be relatively close to him. The climate was the same. It was hot and we had been in the same country a few days before. I went to Trattoria L’Brindellone and ate the taglierini al tartufo, a dish that I will never forget, and two — or three or four — glasses of white wine. I ate and drank for him and myself and cried all week. His death came in the midst of mourning my father, and caught me alone, as I carried out an Odyssean journey, both external and internal, trying to reconnect with a life force. Trying to feel things and find beauty.

Today, after spending almost two years with an invisible enemy, a virus that is always on the prowl that disabled the possibility of meeting another, I can feel the desire for connection and adventure spring up like flowers from the earth, not only in me but in the people around me. Getting drunk on the sidewalk of a bar to remove a couple of filters from our own impulses and see who is with us and what can be unleashed.

With the fear of desire itself, of vulnerability, and other people still being a possible risk, I can say that I see the opening towards the unknown getting closer and closer. The hunger for connection that I have needed so badly has returned.