The article is not as interesting as the title. Sloane from Ferris Bueller's Day Off is now happily married to Kermit the Frog's son, though it's curious to learn she was previously married to James Bond's. Did everyone want to date my mother in the 80s? Who even remembers that far? Mia Sara looks the same until you see a side-by-side comparison with a still from the pool scene, the one where she gets pushed in, yelping. Did you know that wasn’t in the script? Matthew Broderick improvised it and her surprise was so unguarded, so genuine that they kept it in the movie. I’d like to put my mom at my age in the same room as my mom at 62. I hope they'd get along.

There's this old photograph of her that really scares me. My Italian mother’s in the kitchen with her Italian gay best friends. Her Italian mitts are still on. It scares me because I've never seen her laugh like that, not that I can recall. It all looked a little too much like last
weekend, when I made my American friends some French onion soup, and it took me an exceedingly long time. You see, you have to caramelise the onions low and slow, and you can't cheat, or they'll char and won't go jammy. You really just have to stand there, stirring. That’s what makes the soup so good. To feed my friends I stirred onions for five hours and I’ve never been happier, maybe never will be again. Now my mother is so chopped up and cooked down. It makes me cry.

There's this other picture of her that I prefer. It's really quite beautiful, like my favourite Edward Hopper painting in the Whitney. You can't really make out what's going on, except there's a ray of light shooting through a balcony window, and landing on a draping bed. From the quality of the light, it's either sunset or sunrise. To the right, my mother is standing against the glass in an unstudied manner that I also don't recognise. We see her from the side, with half of her face and half of her sweater and all of her rustling hair. She’s looking out to where the photograph can't.

I like this picture much more because it feels infinite, like Edward Hopper was really painting my mom in 1961, the year before she was born. It's such a mundane pose but her hair looks so good I tell her to bring the photo to the salon next time. Just like this, I want her to say. Just like she had it when everyone wanted to date her. Maybe time is the true delusion. Maybe if I stopped worrying all this while, my friends won’t forget me, because once I spent all this time making them a beautiful onion soup. Later I'll watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off again and the eyes of Mia Sara still won't suspect a thing. Then when I close my eyes, my mother will be leaning by the rising sun.

Bryan Ge (he/him) is a junior at Columbia College from Singapore. He is eating. He can be found on Instagram @brie.gouda.