Kane - Cooking and screaming : finding my own recipe for recovery

I had been eating a lot of pasta lately, in all of its many forms. As college life got busier, my meals became increasingly brief, tossed together with ease, eaten, and oftentimes forgotten.

Through the back windows in my kitchen, the sun illuminated the pile of dishes resting in the sink. I will get to those, I thought. I had been a bit frantic lately; my rear end had seemed fused to my desk chair as I spent hours in front of my computer working on my thesis. The end was in sight; this life of imminent papers and stacks of textbooks was coming to a close. My days as a student were coming to a close.

It was a tome, or at least it was in my narrow, nearly postcollegiate world. I left the warmth of the kitchen, and walking to my desk, pulled the final pages of my paper from the printer, neatly placing them into the stack. I grew proud and hungry. Grabbing a bowl of pasta I had made the night before, I took a seat on the floor. I was surprised by my eagerness to lunch on leftovers. But this tagliatelle was one of my favorites. There are certain foods that take on a different identity when reheated, one that makes them exciting and new, if those adjectives can even be used to describe a bowl of pasta. This pasta was blanketed in a pale, creamy green sauce, like a light pesto, but with the smooth, luxurious flavor of another pasta altogether. In the moments respite I had the night before, I stood grating zucchini into piles of shaggy shards. The vegetable had nearly melted, and its traces, combined with a splash of cream, turned the contents of the pan into a sumptuous sauce. By the next day, the pasta grew drier, soaking up the cream and leaving behind bits of fiery chili while the zucchini clung steadfastly to each noodle.

I slurped, then chewed. In my right hand was my senior thesis, The Memoir as a Means to Freudian Psychoanalysis as Seen in Nabokovs Speak, Memory . I had loved this book, voluntarily becoming lost in Nabokovs language for these final weeks of college. My life had become a to and fro, stripped down to the bare essentials. Days were spent in the modern dance studio; in the evenings, I would hunker down in my apartment, curling up on my couch with my dog-eared copy of Speak, Memory and stacks of Freudian reference books.

I had just enough time to put my pasta bowl in the sink, grab a sweater to ward off the chill of Berkeley in the late spring, and meet Maia, my best friend, who had diligently agreed to give my thesis a final read before I turned it in.

I hopped into the car, making my way down the hill to the flatlands near the university. I passed the elementary school, the playground empty and swing set still on this Sunday afternoon. Letting my elbow rest on the open car window, I allowed the cool breezes of May in the Bay Area to mingle with the cars stale air. The wisteria were in bloom, the lavender vines drooping heavily along the entrance to a stately brick church near my apartment. Farther down the hill, the Greene and Greene house, an emblem of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its oxidized copper trim and pagoda-esque eaves, stood alongside the frat houses, ramshackle, littered with beer bottles, and lawn furniture poised on the roof. Berkeley had become my home. It was a place where I was given the opportunity to encounter a variety of different people.

Sitting next to the grubby college student, the politically active classmate, the jocks, and the theater people in giant lecture halls, I steered my way through these countless niches but never truly found my own. Being at Berkeley was as much about a solid college education as it was a place to try on identities. It was difficult to find the ideal, but I had discovered a few things about myself along the way. I loved to dance; I could curl up with a good book for hours; and nothing was more restorative to me than a home-cooked meal. I was young and unencumbered. Living in Berkeley offered me the freedom of endless possibilities. But these endless possibilities also kept me wide-eyed in the middle of the night, raising the question: What do I want to do with the rest of my life?

Maia met me on the corner of Haste and Telegraph, right near Amoeba Records, which was blaring a forgotten hit from the sixties. Over the past four years, I had spent countless Sunday afternoons there, thumbing through the overstuffed racks while some ultraobscure band played in the background.

Maia was punctual as usual, and we walked to get a cup of coffee near campus. Prattling on about our weekends, we traveled arm in arm, as we often did, creating a barrier against the students stumbling home single-mindedly during finals week. Introduced through a mutual friend, Maia and I had become fast friends when we both stayed to enjoy Berkeley in the summertime. When the students go home for their break, Berkeley becomes a ghost town, and Maia and I enjoyed the quiet. I am not sure if it comes from the warm weather, or maybe it is the length of the days, but everything seems to move at warp speed during the summer months. Maia and I had many late-night talks and shared many evenings cooking elaborate meals for no one but the two of us. Now, almost two years later, she had agreed to proofread my thesis, despite the craze of finals week for her as well. Maia was so articulate, even her slang was grammatically correct.