Sunny Side

by Scout Lynch First Place Prose

When I was 7 years old, my friend Elizabeth spent the night. We woke up early in the morning and decided to make eggs. Excitedly, we tiptoed around the small kitchen of my family’s Pikesville house. The stove was a flat top that, the year before, my father had burned his hand on when he ignored my mother’s advice not to touch the burner. He confidently told her, “This thing cools down almost immediately, Jackie! Don’t worry about it!” and pressed his hand down onto it before shrieking in pain. He had to keep his hand wrapped for a couple of weeks because that’s what happens when you don’t listen to your wife. You end up with a medium rare slab of meat attached to your wrist. After setting up, we cracked an egg into the pan and waited for it to cook. The egg white just stayed clear and slowly drooped and spread around the pan while the yolk meekly floated around in it. We decided the egg was a dud that couldn’t be cooked and dumped it out into the garbage. In high hopes, we cracked open another egg into the pan. Surely it would work this time. It didn’t, and we were absolutely baffled. Elizabeth and I went through half of the carton before realizing the eggs were not duds--we had just forgotten to turn the stove on. What a couple of little dinguses.

When I grew into my late teen and early adult years, I had a slew of failed romances. I figured I was a dud egg, not cooking or even sizzling properly, just slowly drooping around, until I deemed myself a failure and gave up. I cracked myself open so many times, with a dumb hopefulness that I can only blame on b-role romantic comedies and Disney movies. Why did that princess turn into such a crispy omelet when she met that man that was so perfect for her, while I was stuck cold and slimy on a cast iron that still had last week’s congealed bacon grease in it? It took me a very long time to finally realize: the stove just wasn’t on. It wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t bubbling into a sunny-side up masterpiece; the pan was cold. Cold pans don’t encourage you or make you feel special; they just stay cold. They stay cold and don’t let you know why. I thought I was such a flop, convinced it was my fault. How could an adult egg who cries at every Pixar movie they watch ever be worthy of being cooked? Eggs who have meltdowns in the middle of grocery stores because they heard too many sounds at once stay in a goopy pile on the stovetop of two forgetful 7-year olds.

Once I had my cold-pan epiphany, I started to love myself a lot more, protecting my flimsy shell and slapping away the grubby meathooks of any man who thought he could crack me open. Never again will I mistake an egg for a failure just because it’s not cooking up right, not because of any newfound wisdom, but because I don’t eat eggs anymore --I’m vegan.