You started cooking again

At some point you stopped cooking and you never decided to. There was no last meal, no announcement. It just got easier to order, and then the ordering became the arrangement, and food became something that arrived, got eaten standing up over the sink, and was over. You salted everything heavily and thought nothing of it. The kitchen turned into a room you passed through, and you would have told anyone who asked that you just do not really cook.

Taste came back first, and quietly. A tomato was suddenly worth eating. Bread had something going on in it. You reached for the salt out of habit and found you did not need it. Taste is a small mercy nobody is owed, and God handed yours back in a tomato. But the real change was not in your mouth, it was in your willingness. Once food tastes like something, taking trouble over it starts to make sense. Effort follows reward.

Look at how much of your life ran on that same rule. Nicotine did not forbid you anything. It just turned down the volume on the payoff until the effort stopped being worth it, and then let you conclude you were lazy, or busy, or not that kind of person. Cooking is attention made edible, and attention was exactly what was being consumed. Getting the reward back gives you the effort back. That will show up in more rooms than the kitchen.

So cook one meal for somebody this week. Not an impressive one. Something with three ingredients you can pronounce, made slowly, with the phone left in another room. Feed a person you love and sit down while they eat it. There is something old and good in that, older than any program: a table, food you made, people you have. Then do the dishes, and go to bed full, and let that be the whole evening. You are somebody who cooks again.