Feelings are stupid.

In prior posts, I may have given you the impression that discussing feelings would be difficult for me. This is correct. In our house, we were never given space to express feelings in a healthy way, so we didn’t learn how to discuss or moderate them. Our household could best be described as contents under pressure, with the occasional, inevitable explosion.

Distance, better friends, and self-care over the years has helped a lot, but once this habit becomes embedded in one’s emotional DNA, it’s very difficult to extract. I’m happy to discuss your feelings, but mine? No no no.

Inconceivable.

So I approached this post with some trepidation. I had no idea what to write.

Ironic, yes? After all these years, I still struggle with expression and permission.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the deadline. As I started writing this post, a memory came forward, a very specific memory involving one friend, one place, and a relatively brief era of my life. And with this memory came a panoply of emotions.

The memory?

The perfect chimichanga

I lived in the area of Daytona Beach, Florida, for a few years in the early aughts. My ex and I quickly became good friends with Sharan, our neighbor across the street, and she and I remained in close contact after I moved away.

While I was still in Florida, Sharan found a Mexican-Cuban restaurant in our neighborhood named Los Amigos and it quickly became our standard place for a go-out, sit-down dinner.

Los Amigos was a smallish, family-owned restaurant in a strip mall on Grenada, across the street from what was then a Publix. Most evenings, the parents and teenage daughters took turns hosting and waiting tables. Occasionally, usually on weekends, some younger children would be sent out with cutlery or chips. The swing of the kitchen door allowed brief glimpses of an older woman rolling tortillas and the younger children at a table drawing or doing homework.

The first time Sharan and I ate at Los Amigos, I ordered a chimichanga and I never ordered anything else. If you aren’t familiar, a chimichanga is simply a traditional burrito –  stuffed with meat, beans, and cheese – but also deep fried until crispy.

I loved those chimichangas. The perfect balance of meat, beans, and cheese. Finely-shredded protein, so there were no big chunks of meat. No skimping on ingredients. The burritos were stuffed to the point I couldn’t guess how they kept them together long enough to deep fry. Scalding hot. Fresh cheese – not queso – melted on top, refried beans as smooth as baby food on the side.

What I most remember is the crunch. As previously confessed, I know almost nothing about cooking but I understand mouth feel. A crunchy, piping hot chimichanga gives great mouth. I’d had perfectly acceptable chimichangas before this, but I had no idea they could be this good.

This was God’s own chimichanga.

I don’t remember the last time I ate at Los Amigos with Sharan. I haven’t been down to Florida in awhile, and on my last visit we met for breakfast at a small diner on AIA. I’ve been chasing that chimichanga for the last decade and still haven’t found one that comes close. I’ve had a few that were pretty good, but not a single restaurant has been able to replicate that perfect crunchy exterior and molten filling, with the right mix of ingredients and great sides.

Los Amigos is gone now. It closed in the early 2020s, due to high operational costs and a poor labor market. Blame COVID and high, post-pandemic inflation.

My friend Sharan is gone too. I don’t know the reason.

On Thanksgiving Day 2021, Sharan made her traditional social media post of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” and hosted a dinner for family and friends. She exchanged a few holiday greetings, made plans with another friend to meet up for lunch the following week. On Saturday, she sent me some funny dog videos via Instagram, our love for and the companionship of our dogs being one of the many things we bonded over. On Tuesday night, November 30, one of her close friends texted to say Sharan had died unexpectedly at home.

Being 1,000 miles away, it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem feasible that more than 20 years of friendship could end with a text. Over the next week, I kept checking her social media for updates that wouldn’t come. More than once, I caught myself holding my phone, ready to text “What happened? How are you doing?” though I never actually started typing, just stared at the screen.

Not long after the funeral, all of Sharan’s social media disappeared. All her photos – travel to Russia, China, South America, her voter registration drives, her dinners and Oscar parties, all her friends and family, her dogs and cats – all gone. I have a few photos and some keepsakes, but had I known…

It took a few days for denial to cave in to grief, but it came. No one said what happened. I still don’t know. Sharan was older than me, though I never realized how much older until I’d known her some 15 years. She always seemed so much younger, but she was of the age where these things happen. She’d never mentioned any serious ailments or illnesses though, no heart condition, no cancer. She hadn’t mentioned feeling poorly, and from her social media, she appeared as active as ever. After some time has passed, I asked some of her closest friends and they also could not say what happened and by then we had to acknowledge we would never know.

I don’t know if knowing would help, but I hate not knowing.

So today, my good memories of lazy dinners with one of my best friends at the best Mexican restaurant I’ve ever found and by far the most perfect of all chimichangas, are leavened by loss. Time passes and Sharan is gone and even our favorite restaurant is gone.

In the midst of grief, life seems like a bad proposition. We’re fragile. Everything hurts. We don’t last long. We don’t figure out what’s good and what works until it’s practically over. If you’re lucky, you get to hold someone’s hand while you work through it, but then that goes too.

It’s a bum deal all around.

Emotions amplify emotions

In one minor memory, dinner with a friend at a Mexican restaurant, I’ve uncovered a lot of feelings – grief, confusion, anger, love, acceptance, depression, fear. If we consider affective states of being – and let’s be expansive in our definition of what you feel – we also have confusion, denial, and eventual, begrudging acceptance.

In my brief tale, the presence of each distinct emotion amplifies those around it. Yes, Los Amigos’ chimichanga was amazing, but my recollection is heightened because I shared the experience with my friend. I doubt my sense memory would be as strong if I’d eaten there alone.

I’m angry that her family pulled down her social media without warning. That felt like a second grieving, along with some helplessness, because I had no input on this decision and no way to appeal.

My grief was exacerbated by confusion and perhaps a bit of shame, because I was not there when Sharan passed. And look – here’s a bit of magical thinking sneaking in at the end, if I let myself believe there’s something I could have done to prevent this, if I hadn’t moved away. Maybe if I had still lived across the street…

When you start to write, you may feel tempted to write about something grand. A significant moment in your life, a turning point, big emotions, but this isn’t necessary and may even be counterproductive. Expectations can paralyze creativity, as I discovered when I started to write this post. I wanted to impress you, maybe show off a little, but when I focused on being profound, my thoughts went blank.

Only after I set ego aside and surrendered to the writing did that corner family restaurant come to mind. This wasn’t remotely the topic I had in mind when I outlined this series, but it’s what arrived when other ideas wouldn’t, and my deadline was approaching. I had to write something, and this is it.

If you don’t know where to start, don’t feel pressured to write something grand.

Start with a chimichanga.

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