Existential Nachos

Sasha Solano-McDaniel

“What do you want?” Mom asked.  

Maybe she was asking what I wanted from life, what I wanted to do with the unnumbered days that remained, what I wanted for my future, or maybe just what I wanted for dinner. It didn’t matter. It was all too much: the hospital bed that moved every ten seconds, making me wonder if bed sores were preferable to the sleepless nights that ensued; the days that started at 3:00 a.m. when the nurses barged in demanding stool samples or blood samples or answers to questions that made me feel crazy; the doctors shrugging, saying they didn’t know what was growing inside my skull, now closed shut with titanium; the ebbing and flowing waves of numbness engulfing exactly half of my body; the sample of my brain that was rotting somewhere in a lab—everything bearing an uncanny similarity to some sci-novel. I was splitting at my seams, but no amount of sheer determination, will or perseverance would change anything, much less stop the cocktail of drugs running through my veins, or return the feeling to my fingers and toes.

“What do you want?” Mom repeated.

What I wanted was a fucking door—a door that closed and remained closed as long as I needed.

What I wanted was to bathe myself—to feel human. To sit outside and breathe fresh air. To scream or to cry, to savor those feelings. What I wanted was privacy and solitude. What I wanted was not visitors but certainty. To know that I could plan my life a month out. To know I had a future, and what it would look like. I wanted the bacteria in the petri dish some five-hundred miles away to grow as fast as it could. Faster than the ones still multiplying inside me. I wanted my mind to feel safe and sane and for my body to do as I said. I wanted to write and to speak and to yell as fast as I could without spitting on myself.

Was that too much to ask?

“It’s almost eleven o’clock,” Mom prodded.

I wanted to be simple—less demanding of myself and everyone around me. I wanted to cut the coil of anxiety wrapped so tight it was hard to breathe, I wanted to not give a shit about the amount of calories in cheese, or the cholesteric properties of nachos. I wanted to eat with reckless abandon, never thinking about the miles I would run to burn it off. I wanted to chew like a normal person, not constricting and constricting until my body followed suit, always hoping, but never really believing, that control would lead to perfection. I wanted to move with ease and pleasure, to start afresh and anew. I wanted to savor every moment, reveling in life’s absurdities and ironies and tragi-comedies. I wanted to drink it up like a bottomless mimosa, never worrying that I had gone too far, relinquishing my power and trusting it to take me where it might, living without worry about what would become of my family, in the case that uncertainty turned concrete in those fast-moving moments, should life sweep me up.

I sobbed, choking on my words, because I could do nothing else. Nothing but seek salvation in a plate of nachos bought from the drive through two minutes away, happy with my choice, should it be my last.

Maybe that’s why now, a year and a month later, I still know how it feels to be uncertain, out of control, at the breaking point, now that the rest of the country has joined me and all others before me, understanding the breaking and pulling, the lack of control in which we live. I am reminded when I catch my classmates’ eyes, emerging for the first time after months in isolation, keeping inside the fact that we’ve been falling hard, gracelessly, and in messy ways, constantly regretting and being thankful, cursing with love and with hate. But maybe we’ve learned something too—each of us in our personal quarantines, living for nachos to get us through sleepless nights, even so separated I can’t help but feeling that we’re all connected in our bouts of uncertainty, liminality and fear, and maybe that’s what my mom meant when she asked me what I wanted that night, and maybe it wasn’t at all. 

Sasha Solano-McDaniel is a senior at Loyola University New Orleans, where she studies sociology and Latin American studies. When she’s not eating or traveling, she finds herself writing to make sense of the world and the unique role we, and the food we eat, play in it.