Tomorrow it will be June, and the heat will inevitably climb till mid-August. And even after, there’s a chance it will seep into fall. We’d been sitting in our room laughing about stories from high school when Gala unearthed photos she keeps in the lining of her wallet. We look much different from when we were sixteen. It really depresses me. The plumpness in our faces has gone, and something around our eyes has changed; the brightness has dimmed. When we were younger, everything for the first time always felt the best, or at least the Most, and sometimes getting older feels like striking the same chord and it sounding different. I shared this melancholy with Gala, who sees nostalgia as the first sign of aging, and she said, “I don’t know how you can be sad in this heat! I, for one, am trying to stay young for as long as possible.” Rest assured, I told her, she will always be younger than somebody else. But not me. We are two months apart.
Gala took thirty dollars from our joint earnings to buy weekly groceries. She has struck a deal with the deli guy who works across the street at Throop Food Market. For thirty, she gets a carton of eggs, a packet of hotdogs, a head of lettuce, ten ounces of turkey meat, one tomato, a loaf of white bread, two Mexican beers, and a pack of discounted Newports. Gala has to put in a couple of dollars for the Newports from her personal reserve because she’s an actual smoker. The man at the deli always throws in items such as twenty straws or a couple of sticks of jerky and a can of Coke. Gala says he probably thinks we need it. The only fresh vegetables that can be found in our neighbourhood are tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and pickles. All of which do well in sandwiches, but I’m concerned we are missing nutrients. I suspect Gala and I are already anaemic.
For breakfast, we have something my grandfather used to make for me when I was little. Gala pouts and whines till I get up to cook it. First, you cut up two hot dogs and put them in a pan with only a little oil, allowing them to brown. Eggs are rather delicate, and if you cook them wrong, you end up using half a carton and still leave two people hungry. When scrambling the eggs, you should always add a splash of milk to make the mixture a buttery yellow. Cooking them on low heat keeps them fluffy. Before they solidify in the pan, add a sprinkle of both cayenne and paprika. Gala says I do this to make sure it is palatable and that there is a fullness in taste. You only need about two eggs per person, so the meal is in fact economical, and it gives you quite a lot of energy due to all that protein.
I am concerned we are slowly falling in with the wrong crowd. It is not that I don’t find artists and actors interesting; it’s that they seem eager to become popular. It takes up a bulk of their conversation, how to become popular, how to sustain popularity, how to keep it from going to their heads. And that does not seem very enriching to me. Maybe the best people to know are the types who are bad at making friends, and from what I have seen, those people are usually writers, academics, or critics. They seem keen to alienate, and I think this is the type to truly give Gala and me the education we need. After all, a diploma is a status symbol, and if we can’t have the real thing, we might as well engage with qualified persons. Because at the end of the day, I want to learn! I picked up a book of essays on cruelty in an effort to better myself. Just from reading, I can tell people are obsessed with themselves, even when they loathe themselves, because they’re charmed with how they do it. I would really like to ask an expert about why this is worth my time.