The First Child of Sundrip Journals (AOL Hometown hosting)

It’s been a few days since my neighbor died. I think people are still in shock and are still angry about how she died. Late yesterday evening I thought about how she ate my cookies about 2 weeks before she died. I wrote a whole entry about wanting to steal the “love” that people have for food. I thought about how I’d given her the cookies and she liked them a lot. I think a bit that it’s better than saying, “I love you” or “I care about you.” I think that …….I would feel much more grief had she not eaten anything that I’d ever made. Isn't that crazy? I didn’t even know her that well. I knew she was a prostitute, that she was on crack and that her life was horrible. I remember her being manipulative and crying when she thought it would benefit her. Some said that she cried like that so much that they thought she would dehydrate herself. I thought that was hilarious. I still do. I think it’s a deep seeded problem for me to be kind of settled inside with her death simply because I know she didn’t die without eating something I cooked. I didn’t have any respect for this girl. I knew the people she hung with were on drugs and sold themselves and are basically a bad bunch. I know that one of her running buddies robbed a blind addict and she said how horrible it was that they did that to him. I said then that if you run with drug addicts and thieves those things would happen. Man, not good. A person’s associations matter. Anyway, it’s almost like I feel like I got to give her a piece of myself and that I almost feel as if its okay that she’s gone…….or like maybe I beat the clock and she got to steal a bit of “love” before she died………when a person eats they don’t chose food that looks ugly and smells bad. They choose food that is colourful and something that suits who they are at the moment. People say, “I feel like a salad today for lunch.” Or, “I don’t know, what do you want for lunch. I think I’m in the mood for….” We base our food on our immediate emotions and desires, not on long term needs and goals. Food has become a superficial fixation that we’ve made the focus of everything we do. The truth is, we don’t need the many, many, many choices that we have. We could survive on much less than we have available to us. But we love to eat. We think about it all the time. We plan around meals; we pick and chose according to how we feel at that very moment. That kind of love and dedication to food is what I want to steal. I think that at times I ………..i think I’m easily forgotten. I think I am easy to forget, that in just a few moments people will forget that I exist. Life goes so fast and people have so much to do. I slip through the cracks after a few moments in their memory. I don’t matter like German Chocolate Cake. I don’t matter like the memory of the bread your grandmother use to make. I’m gone but you can still taste the icing on last year’s birthday cake and you can still smell the bread in the oven that hasn’t been baked since 19 something. I’m gone in moments and I don’t want to be.

You know what? When I was in the 4th grade I remember these pancakes that my mother made. They were so good that we didn’t need syrup on them. I remember tearing them and eating them with my hand. It almost felt like a cultural, foreign hand food type thing when I was eating them. They were light in colour and in texture. I don’t know the recipe to them. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever even tried to make them. I think I want to keep the memory the way it is, kind of undisturbed, not muttled with details of any kind. I can see me tearing the pancake but I can’t see my face. I can see the plate and I can see both of my hands. I don’t have a face. I never have.  

-us-                  

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