Goodbye to sandwich, and college
Learning love from Bell Hooks, slimy creatures, and platonic soulmates
Article and art by Logan Smith
Jill and Katya already have graduation dresses picked out. I’m suddenly very stressed about this whole ordeal. In less than two months, I’ll graduate college still feeling very much like a child.
My grandmother decided to start her radiation treatment now so that she could come to commencement. On Wednesday, she’ll take a pill for her thyroid cancer and become radioactive. She can’t eat iodine and she can’t be around people or animals for a while. On the phone the other day, I asked her what powers she thinks she’ll develop. She laughed but didn’t have an answer. Most prepackaged foods contain iodine, so my mom bakes her fresh bread and drives it an hour to her house. She won’t make sourdough because the idea of feeding the starter, or in her words, “being responsible for the living monstrosity in my fridge,” grosses her out. So, she makes Grammy French bread and sends me pictures of the crust. That’s what it means to love in my family: driving homemade bread an hour away.
We’re planning a family barbeque for graduation weekend. Katya asked whose parent would be the first to do a keg stand. The answer was unanimous. If anyone, it’ll be my dad as my mom looks on in horror. He’s an anxious extrovert, sort of like me. I think he understands my mental health better than anyone else because he’s equally sad and panicked and messy. He can tell if I’m going through a depressive episode just based on how my voice sounds over the phone. But when he visited last, he scolded me for keeping my anti-depressants in the kitchen. “They’re private,” he said, face flushed.
My mental health was at its worst when I was eight. I remember those years of late childhood and early tweenhood as distant, perhaps more distant than toddlerhood feels. I was a dissociated insomniac who had to be picked up from summer camp early and sleep on my parents’ bedroom floor. Sometimes, my therapist and I try to unpack why I was like that at eight and nine and ten and eleven. She draws me back to my childhood home and volatile younger brother. She says she thinks I get angry randomly now because I didn’t have the space to when I was a kid.
Recently, I scored a solid 85 out of 100 on a self-esteem test my therapist made me take. She said that was an “okay score.” I thought it was great. Really, it made me feel kind of amazing. My therapist brought up the fact that a lot of my self-esteem is context dependent—that if I’m not “succeeding,” it could all unravel. And now, I’m thinking about ghosting her.
A while back, Katya asked me if I thought a psychic would agree to only giving her nice predictions if she paid them extra. I told her probably and then wondered if my therapist would agree to something like that too. Though I know if she didn’t call me out, I’d just feel shittier in the end.
I open job applications and think about filling them out and then I don’t. I’m really good at sitting down to apply for jobs and then online shopping instead. I’m bad at saving money, I’m good at dancing in my kitchen. I’m also good at paying for coffee and buying so many avocados at the grocery store.
I feel like a ridiculous child, maybe how I should’ve felt when I was eight. Leaving college is high stakes and at the same time, people also claim it isn’t. They say, you have so much time, but I think they also mean, you have a few more months. I’d get on it if I were you.
There was a potato with googly eyes watching over my kitchen. His name was Sandwich and my housemates and I watched him rot slowly for about three months. We made him hats one night. One of his eyes fell off the next. His last eye fell into my pasta water the other day. Thus, Sandwich was officially out of commission. I ceremoniously disposed of him. I thought about how the death of Sandwich opened up a new opportunity: now when my parents visited, they’d have less questions to ask. The loss of my rotting potato pet has become yet another absurd phantom marker of maturity. But, to be fair, throwing out my potato pet does not mean that I don’t still get an inane amount of joy from putting googly eyes on inanimate objects.
My mom teaches me that love is doing things for people. My dad teaches me that love is listening to music together really loudly while doing dishes. My friends teach me that love also looks like sitting quietly in a room together or letting someone cry without asking too many questions. Dolly Parton said that love is like a butterfly, but I think it’s more like a chameleon. All slimy and slow and changing colors all the time.
Everyday, I get better at taking care of people and letting people take care of me. I watch Katya plan amazing birthday parties for our friends. She painted Ally an incredible portrait of all of us and hid it in Tony’s for her to find on the night of her 22nd. I dance with Ally so hard that we both buckle over, gasping for air. She is joy and light embodied in one human. Elijah reads me their poetry and I always get goosebumps. I sit with Clara in comfortable silence and hours-long conversations. Even in our four years of rooming together, I never have and never will grow tired of her. Jill is one of the most emotionally intelligent 20-somethings I’ve ever met. She gives advice and she just listens. I watch Andrew cook lovely meals on the fly without a recipe. He holds me and I hold him. I fidget relentlessly at night, but he falls asleep so quickly that he doesn’t notice my twitching.
When my mom first had me, she called Grammy in tears one day. I was an absolute menace, constantly screaming and crying. Unbearable in the nighttime. I think having me was harder than my mom expected. Grammy showed up at the door, ready to take a bright red screaming baby in her arms to give my mom a chance to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time. I think a lot about Grammy and mom’s love. How selfless they are for each other. How sometimes, they know what’s best for the other when the other doesn’t even know it. That’s a love that fills my heart up. They don’t say it a lot to each other, but with every single action, they make their love evident. That’s a friendship that I hope translates to me and my mother’s relationship as we both grow older.
I want to be like my mom and show love through my every action, but I also want to learn how to comfortably say it out loud, too. I want to learn how to sit in the softness and say “I love you” easily. Not just when hanging up the phone or climbing out of a friend’s car. I think it’s hard to look someone in the eye and say it without being motivated by a nice gesture or intoxication. Reminding someone I love them just because feels so immensely intimate and genuine, and also out of place because platonic love is so undervalued in the West. We love our friends, but never as much as we love our romantic partners, or our parents. The love we have for friends is presumed to be casual, slightly removed. We’re meant to live miles away from them and see them once or twice every couple of years. We’re not meant to live with them forever, or to start platonic families with them (which, by the way, is a goal of mine, though I think most of my friends still need convincing on this once). I think I have wild love for my friends. It’s a shout-it-from-the-rooftops type of love. For me, declaring platonic love becomes an everyday project.
In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks redefines love as intentional and steeped in accountability. She reminds readers that it isn’t just a thing that happens to you. If we love right, we choose to love everyday and we work hard to make it come across clearly. bell hooks brought agency back into love for me, made it a less illusive beast.
I’m ready to leave this place where I see people I don’t want to see every day and everywhere. And I’m devastated about leaving the place where I also see the people I love everywhere and every day. Everything I do feels like a “last.” This is the last Cipher article I’ll publish, which—maybe unsurprisingly—makes this one nearly impossible to write.
I feel numb right now, but I can tell that underneath the current hush of my brain is sadness. It’ll hit once I leave. Sometimes, if I look at Tavá Mountain for too long, I want to cry, which is how I know. In Colorado Springs, the sun is so strong it makes the snow on the mountains glow and burns the back of my neck. It makes 50-degree weather feel like it’s in the 80s. Sometimes, Jill and I walk downtown with our injured knees, telling one another to go get an MRI, but then neither of us do. We come home sunburned, limping slightly more than usual.
I’ll miss the strong sun that melts away the snow in just a few hours. I’ll miss my musty porch couch. And I’ll miss living so close to so many of my sweet friends. For now, though, I’ll soak it in. It’s all still here. And before it isn’t anymore, I’d like to love it all in abundance.