the kettle

In my final year in Boston, a woman I was sort-of dating gave me an electric kettle.

We met on OKCupid: she was a materials scientist living in Ann Arbor, in her late 30s, at the end of a marriage and I presume a little bored of the dating scene in her neck of the woods, and she messaged me when she was on a business trip to Boston. I was 25, working at Walgreens, living with one girlfriend and seriously trying to date at least one other person who I think might have still been a teenager at the time.

She took me out for dinner and drinks and I was apparently charming enough for her to take me back to her hotel. And for the next five years or so, we wrote to each other and met up something like twice a year. We eventually drifted apart – its hard to say that our lives diverged when they never really converged in the first place, but we were both in weird, transitional stages in our lives when we met, and our new “normal” lives just did not involve the other.

The last time I saw her was early 2016 – she had moved to DC, and I went down to visit her. We got dinner and drinks but I guess my charm had worn off by that point, and I ended the evening sob-masturbating, as you do. We met up again the following day and ended up playing Cards Against Humanity with her boyfriend, her ex-husband (who, I guess, had moved with her from Ann Arbor?) and their tween daughter. She didn’t pick any of my cards.

She sent me the kettle, I think, shortly after our first date, which would have been right before I moved to New York. I had made an offhand remark about how our existing electric kettle – one of those deals you get at the drug store for ten bucks – seemed a little sketchy, so she sent me a fancy Breville kettle with buttons labelled for different tea temperatures. Now I understand that dropping a hundred bucks on a teapot is no big deal if you’re making six figures (and she had probably spent that kind of money on our date) but it seemed like a dramatic gesture to someone on a Walgreens salary.

I brought it with me to New York, though it honestly didn’t get much use for the following, uh, decade – once I started working in tech, I got much more into the habit of drinking coffee at the office or at a cafe on my commute; I would bet that for several years that kettle only made the occasional hot toddy. But much like how quarantine has gotten me making my own cocktails again, I’ve been using the kettle nearly every day to make my morning cup of tea.