Eat, Pray, Love

I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I
peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus
(which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the
plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria
down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert—a lovely peach, which the
woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sun-
light. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece
of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had
fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean
wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper art-
icle in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule.
Until—as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such
happiness—my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband’s voice speaking disdainfully in
my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life to-
gether? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper?
I replied aloud to him. “First of all,” I said, “I’m very sorry, but this isn’t your business any-
more. And secondly, to answer your question... yes.”
Eat, Pray, Love