what to do with leftovers.

It looks like a dead body. Well, it is.

The turkey lies there, stripped, bones made even more pale and brittle by the chilling temperature of the fridge. Yesterday, it was the star of the show, paraded to the table in golden glory. People cheered for it, carved into it, devoured it. Today, no one even acknowledges it. Looks? Picked apart. Pathetic. Ugly. Taste? Cold. Greasy. Disgusting.

Mistakes taste the same. Like leftovers, they have an aftertaste.

They linger in your mind, torturing you with their jagged edges constantly prodding and reminding you of their undeniable presence. A harsh word you can't take back. A decision made too fast or too slow. A missed opportunity. A failed attempt. Like the turkey, they seem to scream: This is what’s left of you.

And it's tempting to throw it all away. To pretend the mess never existed. To push it to the back of the fridge to be slowly forgotten. But mistakes don't stay hidden. You know that as well as I do. They show up when you're lying in bed or during a late-night drive where even your music can't distract you. You can ignore them all you want, but they don’t disappear. They just sit there waiting for you to decide: Do I deal with this, or let it rot?

My mother never lets anything rot.

She'll take the turkey out of the fridge and look at the pile of scraps, examining the flecks of flesh still hanging on to the joints. She'll shred the remaining meat, dump it into a Dutch oven, add carrots, celery, chicken stock––things that smell alive––and let everything cook on the stove. She'll throw the carcass in there too. On the next burner, she'll have a pot of boiling salted water filled to the brim with pasta. The delicious turkey noodle soup that comes out of the culinary concoction doesn't care that it started out as "trash." It's still rich. Still warm.

It's not easy, pulling apart the scraps of who you are, the broken parts of you, and deciding what to do with them. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes you get it wrong. But if you can look at those scraps and see them as more than just waste, you're already moving forward.

It's funny that my mother's soup always tastes better on the second or third day––that is if it hasn't run out by then. Maybe it's the way the flavors settle, deepen, and become more intense than they were before. Maybe it's just that soup needs time. Time to simmer. Time to figure itself out.