Beans and Rice

In the end, I always return to beans and rice. 

There is no food in the fridge. 

Except beans and rice. 

I don’t know what to eat. 

Eat Beans and rice. 

I am too tired to think. 

Beans and rice. 

I have eaten lots of beans and rice lately. I eat them in tacos, I eat them with omelets, I eat them in fat bowls filled with lettuce and homemade salsa and rich avocado and a grind of pepper. Beans and rice bring me home. Beans and rice are home. 

I keep trying to bring myself home. Home to myself. I tell me the stories I’ve accumulated over the past year, the stories of  where I’ve been and what I’ve done and how I felt. And people have told me so many stories.  I’ve told these stories to myself, and to so many others. I have told these stories too many times, until now, I almost feel like the meaning that they originally had for me has perhaps begun to fade. 

This summer has been so strange. 

I have had the blues. Too much feeling. Too much thinking. 

I am lucky in my friends, lucky in my family, but there are some times and some days where growing up feels so impossibly difficult. 

Right now it is raining, a dreary, humid summer rain, and I can hear the dripping though my window, over the hum of the air conditioner. 

I eat beans and rice. 

I’ve spent this summer writing endless letters I don’t send, to myself and to the people I love. My friend once told me that the “only letters she had ever sent were love letters” and I think that is just excruciatingly beautiful. 

Because it is true. 

Every letter I have ever written has been a love letter. 

So this is a love letter to beans and rice. 

This is a love letter to growing up.

This is a love letter to summer, no matter how strange, no matter how blue. 

This is a love letter to myself, a fierce reminder that I will always be worthy of love letters, even if I have to send them to myself. 

This is a love letter to my mother, who listens, who made the beans and rice. 

This is a love letter to the people I work with at the restaurant, from whom I am learning so much. 

This is a love letter to the beautiful friends I have, to the friends I have yet to make, to the friends who have disappointed me, whom I will love anyways. 

This is a love letter to the kind strangers. 

This is a love letter to all the stories I've been told. 

This is a love letter to real talk. 

To air conditioning. 

To the internet.  

To walking. 

To Joni Mitchell. 

To shopping. 

To the future. 

To coffee. 

To sleeping. 

To hope. 

To writing. 

To the radio. 

To summer rain. 

But mostly, it’s a love letter to beans and rice.