I’m thinking about cupcakes and friendship and wanting a friend who is no longer a friend to give me cupcakes that I won’t eat because cancer and sugar don’t mix but this friend used to give me cupcakes when we were friends but not close friends because I was never truly myself with her although when I heard this friend was giving cupcakes to other people but not to me it made me feel left out and I don’t like being left out and anyway this cupcake friend has asked for so many things over the years like taking her to the doctor and sitting with her during chemotherapy and visiting her dying mother and I haven’t asked for anything says my mind so a few cupcakes is the least she could do as long as she is making them for other people who haven’t sat with her when she was sick because isn’t it my turn although I no longer eat cupcakes or want to be the cupcake maker’s friend but I still want to be wanted by anyone, everyone, even those I don’t like which prompts me to ask if it’s true that I want to be wanted by this friend and be given cupcakes that I won’t eat and the real answer is no because the kind of love I once received by her never really felt like love although I was so busy wanting to be wanted that I ran right over all the signals that said honey she is not for you she is not a match and so why I ask myself today would I want to be given cupcakes that I wouldn’t eat by a friend who isn’t a friend and one answer might be that I’d rather want than have which may have started this is just a guess with my mother who I wanted to love me in a way that felt like love wanted her to call me sweetheart but the mother I had not the dream mother I thought I wanted could not have done that because of her own loneliness and although I convinced myself for fifty years that I wanted my particular mother to want me it’s not true because even if my mother said oh sweetheart honey darling her words would have been curdled by her unhappiness her bleakness and I wouldn’t have felt cherished which is all I ever wanted from her and for that matter all I want from being given cupcakes I won’t eat by a friend who isn’t a friend and now that I name this insistent desire to want something from someone who cannot possibly give it (it reminds me of all those men I wanted who didn’t want me who lived across the country or thought I was too fat and weren’t attracted to me and how much energy I poured into convincing them I was cherishable) I turn toward myself which is such a radical act to turn towards rather than away which feels like a gnawing in my belly and I’d rather run on broken glass than feel that but after thirty seconds I let myself dip into it and it becomes a feeling of being unloved, empty, and as soon or almost as soon as I feel that there is a soft green rain infusing and surrounding the emptiness and now it doesn’t feel terrible in fact it feels like the unlove which is what the wanting is made of is being met by kindness which is itself a kind of cherishing which is all it or I ever wanted from cupcakes.