Nostalgia Sequence: Between the bread and the tin foil

 School lunchtimes and sunny days. Memories of black tights sticking to your thighs but also somehow falling halfway down your legs, and regulation blazer sleeves rolled up to your elbows. 

Filing into the too small lunch hall that makes you feel like a baby chick in an incubator, and rooting around in your ratty jansport backpack for the specifically sliced sandwiches your dad used to make you for lunch, (before you started throwing your lunch away on the way to school), always cut in half but slightly at an angle, neither rectangle nor triangle in a comforting negation of socially acceptable forms and shapes.

The sandwiches are a bit squashed in their tin foil now, 

Beneath all of the books and folders that you carry around with you for days in advance of when you’ll actually need them, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to bring them until Thursday. 

Remember how, when you were growing up (as if you aren’t still), lunch times were always such an anxiety inducing temporal drag, 

Of people you wished you didn’t have to endure, so that the day would pass you by at a quicker pace, and you could just go home. 

So that you’d be one day closer to eventually leaving this place, and all of its people, behind. 

Except now, now that you’re older and you’re somewhere else, and you’ve been somewhere else for almost as long as you haven’t, you’ve started to cherish the lunch hour. 

That space in the middle of the day, when you have time to take yourself away with a book, and pick at your foil wrapped, slightly misshapen sandwiches on a bench in the sun, listening in but apart, rather than a part, of the conversations being had around you. 

But the sandwiches, half eaten in their little foil parcel, don’t taste as good as they did, now that your dad isn’t here to make them for you, or to write an “A” on the tinfoil in whiteboard marker that had always rubbed off by the time you’d gotten to school. 

And neither is your mum, to slide in a note written in her curly, joined up handwriting, that tells you she hopes you’re having a nice day. And that, even from the age of seven, would sometimes make you cry in the school canteen. 

Maybe because you already knew, that when you were older, you would miss finding her on your lunch break, hidden between the bread and the tinfoil.