I was more puzzled by the fact that the family acted as if this was normal. The father politely waited for his two kids to climb in next to me. I scooted over so I was on the edge of the crescent-shaped booth. The mother squeezed in and the father followed. He nodded at me and then grabbed a menu.

“What’s good here?” he asked.

Lyle was the real deal. He had been a Vietnam Green Beret, broke wild horses in his spare time, and was one of the very few people left in the world who still knew how to drive a four-horse stagecoach. He looked me up and down. “You ain’t from Montana.” 

My Mork from Ork attachment makes me wonder why kids cling to objects, or why they’re drawn to characters from T.V. Why do we require that thing in our hands, our grip, near our noses to feel emotionally organized and at ease from setting to setting? Blankies, dolls, pillows pieces of fabric, whatever it may be that gives children (and sometimes adults), the feeling of comfort and home. Why do we run to their refuge in our beds or on our sofas and hold them tighter than life? 

Yesterday he texted me the definition of a new word he was excited to learn, “freudenfreude.” It’s best translated as “the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds, even if we weren’t directly involved.” This morning, as I watched him watch me scarf down my favorite donut from Dunkin’ Donuts (a creation filled with something called “cookie butter”), I realized he’d given me a word to describe the look on his face.  

The cars are angled to mimic the Great Pyramid of Khufu’s faces, which is one of my favorite things I didn’t know at the time. That seems like the type of fact to put on a plaque to help illuminate the general public and alleviate their apathy. Attempting to establish a correlation between these cars and the Great Pyramid is nothing short of incredible. What’s more American than that?

Dust off court documents dated three decades ago, one sees the journey of lost time, lost life, and bloodshed. Like the pages of a yearbook, the photographic lens of these documents capture the violence hidden in the mouths of the few who travelled their telling tales down time. 

The discussion of the two couples had shifted to immigration and the southern border wall. Tom, of course, had the sharpest and loudest opinion. Something about the country being overrun by illegal immigrants, all of them welfare moochers who belonged in jail. Heads in the booth bobbed in agreement. The only objection was a mild one—-“Lower your voice, Tom,” one of the women said. 

Except she wasn’t looking. Here, blood was trickling like rust from a spigot, and my mother couldn’t be bothered to see it. We’d already made our way down one aisle and now we were making our way down another. But the blood went unnoticed because something else seized her attention. Something that wasn’t just pulling her along through the aisles, but pulling her away from me, from this moment.

When your parents are expats, you learn to move fast. Sometimes you only live somewhere for a few months, usually moving in the middle of the school year. You can’t afford to spend much time making friends, even if they do speak English, which was rare in the places we lived. Better not to invest much in getting to know someone when you—or they—could leave, possibly the next day, and you’d never see them again. 

I was still a bit sullen about the Powder Puff debacle and looked forward to making up for it by dotting my new helmet with the skull and crossbones stickers Coaches passed out for kicking ass when it mattered most. And this time I wasn’t some faceless lineman blocking for someone else’s glory. 

That’s all he had for me - and honesty he wasn’t wrong. By no means was this a Michelin Star dish. It probably had many flaws that any human who’d ever tried any type of pasta could point out. But it tasted so good to me because it meant so much to me. I couldn’t help but take it a little personally because its sporadic involvement of ingredients and hodgepodge of techniques was a reflection of me. 

Down a rabbit hole, I spiraled, pairing Antoine’s name with multiple keywords: writer, photographer, book, blog, UCLA, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. In my quest to prove an association, I scoured articles, interviews, and book summaries. And with each virtual page, I peeled away another degree of separation.

I pick it up and see that he chose a dinosaur book for tonight’s bedtime reading. Sweet. I love dinosaurs. I pick up the hardcover book. It’s an A-Z dinosaur book. A is for Ankylosaurus. B is for Brachiosaurus. Everything is going just fine until F.

The scary thing about the process of medicating yourself is that one day you’re switching medications because something isn’t doing the job correctly, and the next thing you know six months have passed, and you’ve been existing in a zombie-like state, completely unknowingly.

I dialed the Figure in the Sky long distance, saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, not even a dial tone. Sensing I was coming under increasing strain, Pastor Bingea inquired gently of my progress, but all circuits were busy. “No such number. If you want to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”

“Can you please lift your arms?” the brace fitter asks, as if this is a choice, and not a fundamental, immovable line that I must cross. This moment marks another line, before and after. It demands my compliance, my acceptance, my submission. It is a first, one more piece of this beginning.

My fascination with food started early. My parents were excellent cooks; my father was a passionate lover of eating out and educated us on foods of different cultures. I remember the taste of things from a young age. The freshest of fried calamari in Lumut, where our family would rent a holiday house on the beach. The smell of fish drying on the wharves.

Matt seemed relieved to have me to confide in, but he had a flight to catch, and I had anxious parents awaiting me in the classroom. “Get on that plane,” I typed discreetly into my purse, “and call when you want to talk. I’ll be here.”