I had the world's strangest roommate. We were best friends in college and she seemed like the perfect person to live with. She was a great listener, she was obsessed with Clive Owen and her purse was always stocked with remedies to just about anything – creams, lotions, pills, even powders. Everything was going great, until one day, it just wasn't. Her once mild room-dancing had started to rival the sound of a herd of elephants, her attempts to match our outfits had turned from sort of cute to sort of single-white-female (except that she's five feet tall and Asian) and she had invited her new best friend to come live with us for a month, without consulting me. She finally decided to move out, taking her friend with her. And they went amicably enough.
I came home with my friend Amanda that night to cook dinner, so excited to have the place to ourselves. We skipped around the apartment, lay down on the floor of the now empty second room and made our way into the kitchen to create a culinary masterpiece to celebrate our freedom. That's when we found out that she'd decided to take all of our utensils with her. Every last one, except . . . my dainty, little, silver cake knife. We'd come way too far to go back to Amanda's house for dinner and neither of us really wanted to shell out the money for take out. Plus, how hard could it be to cook Huevos Rancheros with a cake knife?
We used it as a knife and fork respectively to cut and mash up the avocados for guacamole, we used it as a spatula to flip the eggs in the pan, we even used it as a spear to open up a can of organic tomatoes (which I highly recommend not trying at home). While I am incredibly happy to have a complete set of silverware again, I have a newfound appreciation for my once seldom-used utensil.
Maia Harari is a writer and choreographer. Her most recent credits include It's All in Your Head, 2003 and Danse Macabre, 2000, and she is currently working on Confetti, an episodic internet series chronicling the lives of twenty-somethings running wild in LA. She currently lives in Los Angeles.