cozy romance recipe

by Mileva Anastasiadou

You only need sugar and honey and heartache. You mix well with an open mind. You place the ingredients on a beach. The world vanishes as you enter the realm of nothingness, where nothing exists but all can be built from scratch and everything is possible. You take a dive into the blue waters,

you hold your breath,

you count to ten.

One comes with a promising title, like

A Bookstore

which sounds cozy enough, but you add

at the End of the World

to make it weird. Nobody knows yet if you mean the middle of nowhere or the end of times.

Two comes with good use of title by making it part of the tale, which

isn’t what you’d normally expect to find

at the beginning, but it introduces a question of what one should expect to find at the end of the world or at the beginning of a story

Three comes and you waste no time, as you introduce the main character, now that you’ve ignited the spark in the reader’s mind by mingling ends with beginnings, the same spark that burns inside you and

Kate, the girl from Mars

who left everything behind, a planet, a life, a world, to jump into your story

Four you think, then wonder if girls should be from Venus, but you know better, because Kate defies stereotypes, this is implied, or left to be imagined, as is what brought her at the end of the world, where she

expected to find a cliff

or some kind of ending

Five comes with a plot twist, because things don’t go as planned always, not in life, not in stories. You may have lost love, but Kate was lucky, because,

instead she found love

which isn’t what you’d normally find at the end of the world; except in cozy romantic stories, it often happens, and it can remind you and the reader that love can be found at the most unexpected places

Six and time flies, it’s running out, soon you’ll lift your head, you’ll rise above water and facts and sadness, and you’ll forget how love hurts when it ends, but now you’re here, and Kate’s here, and you’re both happy because

she found the boy from Venus, and then

something must happen, because that’s how stories work, when people interact, when they come together

Seven, and time stops while

she kissed him

Eight and you forget, what eight was for, yourself, your pain, the world, because your world ended but those two still kiss,

while the world was ending, holding on tight as

(you remind yourself, the reader, the universe) not all love is lost at the end

Nine you count, and you must end the story, make sure they last forever, find them a safe place where love can’t die and stories can’t be unwritten. They’re at the bookstore and the world is ending, and they’d only be safe, if

they jumped into the pages of every book

where truth is kept forever even if nothing else remains, where imagination runs wild and free even in bodies imprisoned

Ten and last and just before you run out of breath, you think of a meaning, the reason you dived into these waters, the ends and the beginnings and everything in between,

because the world starts over, when aliens meet and ends turn into brand new beginnings.

You lift your head above the water, take a big breath, you see the sun and this isn’t a craft essay, this isn’t a story about a story, it’s but a story about making something out of nothing, about how you dive into the blue for only ten seconds, with only sugar and honey and a big empty hole in your heart, then come out of the waters holding hope and romance and something tiny but also bright and shiny and new.

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