Rotating about the sun, here I am again with all my cells shedding and regrowing, same but different. Now 32, I opened the first day of my 33rd year skipping across a field with my dog to ABBA. Bucolic, but make it weird and gay with a pitbull shaped cow.
My phone held little love notes from little loves, one of which wished me a wheelbarrow of hot cheetos and peach rings. How could I ask for anything more?
It feels good to be known, in big ways, and in small unnaturally, deliciously colored ways.
In the third grade, we had desks with wood tops and cavernous black grey plastic bellies to hold our mechanical pencils, rulers, folders, and small tokens of care. One of my classmates was named Megan. Her name is still Megan. When Megan turned 32 like me, she’d be an oral surgeon. But when we were small and the same age as third graders are, she was just a student who loved snacks. We were more the same than different.
We weren’t supposed to eat in class unless it was an appointed eating time, but Megan and I couldn’t help ourselves. Our tiny paws would slowly wait for the right time, a bell to ring or a kid to sneeze-fart. At that perfect moment, she’d rip the snack sized bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos open, like unfolding an envelope of a long lost love letter. Pop.
In an act of supreme care, Megan would, one at a time, hand me quiet cheetos under the side of the desk. One for her, one for me. A sharing ritual. I’d line them up in the groove inside the desk belly, like a bright red lump train, in the little divot meant to keep pencils from rolling right out its mouth.
When Mrs. Bergstrom wasn’t looking, and without changing my gaze or head placement like a strange frozen mannequin, I’d quickly slip a single hot cheeto into my mouth. There it would sit, burning my tastebuds, getting soggy enough on my tongue that I could invisibly masticate and swallow the spongey hotness. Shape shifting, turning from solid into something else not entirely solid, a practice of physics.
One thing about me, forever and ever, a genetic disposition from grandpa to mom to me is that spicy things make my nose run. I’d use the end of my sleeve to wipe away the signs and symptoms of secret cheetos, and once my portion of the bag was clandestinely passed to me and then turned to softness in my mouth, I’d wipe all of the highlighter red hot cheese dust from my right index finger and thumb onto the side of my Gap pants. Sometimes, depending on how caked my finger pads were, I’d have to hold onto my pant fabric and run my finger and thumb around it like rolling a tiny ball until the red dust would bead and roll away.
For the next few minutes, I’d spend my time exhaling concentratedly out of my mouth to cool down my tongue while practicing enviable multitasking because I could breathe and learn about how animals practice adaptation to survive in various habitats. Hot breath. Fire breath. Dragon girl. Sloths with moss in trees.
Megan and I would make eye contact and stifle a hot-breathed giggle. We’d mastered the art of secret cheeto eating, again.
Zip forward through space time to now and this small care snack follows me everywhere. When I interviewed potential candidates to hire for a job in 2022, the icebreaker I used was “what’s your favorite snack?” The best candidate was best for many reasons, but also because we both said hot cheetos.
Yesterday, in 2024 (all hail being back in an even year), as we were buying a large selection of frozen pizzas to have on hand for late night pizza eating at a gathering of disco dancing this weekend, I snagged the hot cheeto puffs bag from the register display. As Iman hopped on a work call, I quietly rustled my tiny paw in the bag, placed a big hot puff on my tongue, and let it do its melting magic. As it softened, I handed Iman a puff to put in their mouth.
We sat side by side, quietly, letting physics do its particle-changing magic, shape shifting from solid to something other. I wiped my snot. I breathed my hot breath like a funny cheeto flute. But now, as a grown up, I reached down into the gully of the driver’s side door and pulled out the microfiber cloth I used to wipe off the car wash wetness. I rolled it between my right index finger and thumb, waiting for the highlighter red cheese to transfer from finger pad to yellow towel. Adapting to new environments.
There are ways I have adapted and evolved. From age eight to 32, many things have changed. Now, I’m not shameful to eat when I need. I worry less about mess on my clothes (am I aging backwards?), I source cheetos myself instead of waiting for them to be passed to me, passing them on to someone else as a quiet care.
But in other ways, I am the same. Battling tiny voices of worry that I’ll be chosen last, or forgotten, or found to be too boring, or used to do homework because that’s what “friends” are, right? Holding my words inside my body until they bubble up so forceful and loud that they come out at the wrong time in the wrong ways. Preferring even numbers to odds, for no logical reason at all besides that they feel better. Wondering what I’ll be when I grow up, what I’ll find fulfilling and mine and ours. Dreaming about big love. Talking too much when I’m scared.
What balms did you turn to as a little? What felt like awesome care like a secret meant only for you? What would it mean to offer yourself that secret again and again, today and tomorrow?
Here’s to all the ways I am the same and different at eight and 32. Aging as a mirror.
On Monday I go back to work after a couple weeks off. My body found some peace and some instability in the lack of structure. Lots of sleep, but also lots of wondering what to do with my thoughts and body. Sort of like dreaming, an odd shifting in and out of awareness and detachment.
Feeling so grateful for the messages, Marco Polos, postcards, and texts I got on Tuesday. Thank you for loving on me at the start of this new year, for the calendar and for my body.
The plates are shifting, the tectonic ones. We are in motion as a community and society, rubbing up against the pains of colonization, of coercion, of the stories we’re told to not pay attention to the grief and horror of our global sisters and brothers and lovers. The plates are shifting, here too. Creative works in the middle of no where. Strings between beings getting twisted and turned anew. These shifts mean soon, a sexy new lava spewing volcano of mass change will develop.
I feel it bubbling, an arc on the horizon, its mouth agape, breathing its hot breath. Dragon girl.