When I woke up this morning, my throat felt red hot. Burning and lightly scratchy, a comical yet expected stop in the road after 3 straight weeks of running, playing, dancing, being. The idea of buying groceries felt entirely foreign, but I slid my shoes on without socks and went to the Turkish grocer on the way back to my flat. I let myself get distracted by their endless section of tomatoes and put some in my basket along some stealthy zucchinis and a big bag a shallots. Soup, I said to myself. I need soup.

Soup has been on my mind for longer than this morning, longer than slurping the hot broth from instant ramen on a campsite in Dorset a few days ago, longer than daydreaming about how Baba would make her soup, how close would I ever get to making her recipe, how much Vegeta would I need, would she eat mine if I didn’t serve it with a plate of pećeno chicken and boiled carrots and potatoes? What sticks most in my mind is meeting my friend Alison for coffee toward the beginning of this summer, tucking ourselves into a cafe near Carnaby Street and feverishly chatting about life and music and life in music and stumbling upon about the shared phenomenon of being ‘in the soup.’

What is ‘the soup’ you may ask? Maybe the soup is where you have lived for along time, a big stew of your thoughts and feelings, maybe bobbing along within your responsibilities, alive, omnipresent. I imagine it to be a minestrone, something with a clearer broth and bits we collide into, sometimes with softness, other times chunky, surprising bursts of flavour. This metaphor has stuck with me while moving through this summer, thinking of what ‘the soup’ of my life has looked like, both in the wholeness of my days and the micro-moments, the embracing of a creative existence.

The soup is representative of where life is, amorphous, tastes and textures of life coming into focus. I wondered if thinking of my day to day in relation to the soup was ‘too poetic’ and decided not admitting my relationship to the soup would be a disservice to myself, something that goes against the kind of artist-person I want to be. And the truth is that the soup has been many things, a pool of my emotions, a movement between reality and dreamland, a fear of staying in the latter too long. But why? one might ask. This is what I keep asking myself.

The soup is nor bad or good, it just is. It’s something to be within and also exist outside of, for whatever reason that may be. The soup is creative, emotional - it’s whatever you want it to be, really. When I think about my own life, I have been ‘in the soup’ but not allowed myself to be ‘in the soup’ if that makes sense - emulsifying my emotions into a bath I need dive into rather than allowing myself the time and space to float within the creative juices I have, the ones that sit at the tips of my fingers, if only for a moment, waiting to be expanded upon. Do I have to remind myself to be in the soup? is what I came from this coffee date wondering. Maybe. But for how long? When will I be done? Another question worth mulling over, I think.

There is a difference between feeling stuck in ‘the soup’ and allowing yourself to be in it, to feel what you ended to, to explore boundlessly. My dad used to put ice cubes in our soup when we were kids to cool it off to the perfect temperature. I used to be so freaked out by it, wanting to inhale the boiling liquid as soon as humanly possible but not wanting the cold ice to touch my tongue. I haven’t done this since I was a kid - cracked an ice cube out of the tray and put it into my soup, but the memory of it haunts me slightly, reminding me of a version of myself that is small, dangling legs on a high kitchen chair. In a way, this is what these few weeks of life have felt like - completely unfamiliar and out of grasp, a language I understood but have lived in parallel with, a look at my spot at the dinner table, at 7 year old me, talking about my day at school, everything I know about myself yet something entirely new, fresh, a promise to myself to be ‘in the soup’ - my soup, that is.

I started my lunch break today by crossing little x’s into the tops of my tomatoes and placing them in boiling water. I chopped my ingredients - finely diced shallots, garlic, basil stems, zucchini rounds chopped into quarters, a thick chunk of parmesan rind - and before I knew it, it was time to drain the tomatoes and peel their skin away, exposing their raw flesh, sliced and added later into the post to emulsify with the oily, peppery zucchini slices. I put on a podcast and listened for words, for inflections of sentences, embraced the garlicky aroma from my Dutch oven, and dropped my shoulders to the ground. In between sips of tea I stirred the pot and watched as it came together slowly, rice puffing up slightly between chunks of vegetable and broth, digging out the good-quality olive oil out of the back of my cupboard to douse over the top. What would it be like to allow myself a softness like this, to be in my own soup for longer than a lunch, to care for and look after the relationship between myself and my art?