someone, a friend or so i thought, showed me this afternoon a picture of the ex cavorting in a sparsely peopled tropical beach with his new, younger, way younger boyfriend in what must be their first summer together. the poet rilke wrote “for one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.” ah, there’s the rub, human being. once on a trip to italy, we got so hungry that our group had to make this unplanned stopover at an unpromising truck stop to get some junk snacks to tide us over. loving another, rilke added, is “the work for which all other work is but preparation.” we didn’t do anything other than found ourselves hungry inside this unprepossessing hole-in-the-wall with this beefy baker kneading his own dry dough, baking his own crusty bread, making the most glorious porchetta sandwiches.