the best sandwiches of your life

July, 2024

you had peanut butter and honey from kindergarten till year 12. you dropped out of advanced english in the afternoons after school because you could never eat enough of them and your stomach burped and bubbled, but you.did.not, you.did.NOT go to the toilet in high school. 

the best ones were the 16 year old growth spurt / hormone injection / damien rice’s first album peanut butter and honeys when you smoked billies in a cave in your free period and ate those sandwiches at recess. you had a noodle cup and pie at lunch because you were so hungry and you were flush with money from refereeing touch footy. 

it was the safe independence that got you – child-adult days that felt like the world was opening up beyond your bedroom and was showing you a million new things but almost maybe probably was going to swallow you, too. 

there was one day you remember – sitting around playing handball at lunch, that red sky you’d get coming out of summer when you can feel the days getting shorter, but the air is still speaking about waterholes and singlets at house parties and it doesn’t matter that the teachers think you’re a dope.

you can remember that dry, disobedient warmth right now. that was one of the best of your life. 

 

you had their first bacon and egg roll – actually – living above a pizza shop on king st when you knew exactly how much money you had at that very time, how many stamps were left on your bus ticket and how many more classes you could miss to write songs without failing journalism school. 

you made your own sandwiches, and hundreds for others, at a greek cafe where you washed dishes and sliced whole boxes of mushrooms. 

they tasted like only just making it – just making it awake, into clothes, past the tangle of guitar leads and lyrics taped to the walls, out of the slanted house, tripping through your own drunk chaos – and you would just make it to the end of the day and to class, just make the end of conversations and the week, and you’d just make the rent; but you’d never felt more alive, because every moment was basically the only moment.

one of the best of your life was when you got your first real Job and bought a japanese-made stereo and set it up and nothing could ever had sounded better than led zeppelin that day and you took yourself for the big breakfast for the first time across the road because YES you are doing this, you’re OK, you’re a person!

 

there was a basil pesto sandwich on the first trip away that made you stop in the street and wonder what you’d been eating before. you mostly ate baguettes with mayonnaise sachets, crouched in alleys next to your life in plastic bags. you came home with more money than you started with, and wished you’d had more best sandwiches.

do you remember you came back and thought maybe you’d truly learnt and changed something? but at times also wondered if you’d just been a slotcar going around the track like everyone else.

it didn’t matter; you’d made it off the other track you started on – where there weren’t any good stops, just a circuit that got progressively more boring and fatter. it didn’t matter that there were thousands of people lining up to see a tiny painting – you’d made it at least 4 modes of transport away from where you’d started, where you rode a pushie to get anywhere, so it was still one of the best sandwiches of your life.

 

there was a period of them that didn’t do much good for you, at all, no matter what went into them. 

pickles did nothing for you.

they were the worst sandwiches of your life.

they were had at silent cafe mornings with rocky chairs or in a dank courtyard where nothing grew and even the sun found an excuse to avoid every day – and it felt about right because everything around you died and what could you do but keep looking at that and holding it and turning it over? but what sun would touch that, and what can grow without sun, and so what sun would touch that?

nothing sounded good or screamed or even said anything of any importance to you, everything just sounded like the car needed servicing or when you wake from a nap at dusk and it could be 6pm or 6am and everything is humming in your head like your neighbour’s playing bad metal. 

you couldn’t barely remember the feeling of the best sandwiches of their lives, then. 

every peanut butter and honey took you back to the worst memory of those, not the best – your brother spraying deodorant down your throat in front of the school bus and everyone watching from the windows with a straight face and their sandwich in their mouths like you’re in an enclosure, but this zoo sucks.

you wanted to touch the best ones – the caramelised onion and ham you made yourself in the lunch break at the cafe that time and you were so fucking great with a knife and you looked sick in an apron – but you’re not allowed in there now, no no no no – take the soggy one at school when your juice popper leaked all over it, because that’s what you deserve. 

 

then one day that darkness lifts, just a little bit, for no real reason but time, maybe, and your friend that comes to stay over and won’t leave, and the lightness that brings. 

 

and then, finally, you have another of the best sandwiches of your life, because you can taste it. 

 

there’s one you make for your parent after their divorce, the parent that made peanut and butters for 13 years with YOU imprinted on the white bread from the texta running through the grease proof paper. 

3,510 or more peanut butter and honeys and you show them what you’ve learnt since then – with a knife, sandwiches, and, you hope, empathy – and how you’ve appreciated them.

you make them walk on the beach every day and stop them drinking on mondays and you both have some of the best of your lives. 

calm. 

 

then you have the actual best of their life when you aren’t looking for one at all.

it’s roast chicken and vegetables and chippies and you barely touch it because you sit down and someone just starts telling you about the best sandwiches of their life for no reason at all.

you are staring into them and you see them; really see them like they’ve opened something in you and you can’t look away because they are seeing back into you, too, and they talk about the best of their lives and their first and lasts and why.

you talk together for the first time in a language both of you have been speaking for years but you’ve only understood on your own till now, and you know that something that has opened can never be closed, again. 

you fall over yourselves, speak over each other, to tell stories and hear each other in that language – but it’s the why in all of it that gets you and you both recognise it in each other – escaping the suburbs for more and nostalgia for what you learnt in shitty jobs and the joy in scrapping to make it your way – always scrapping and always only just making it.

the best of this person’s life is new socks for new adventures, a song that kicks you like lightning, running with aeroplane arms on the beach and suburban chinese restaurants. it’s homemade popcorn and bogart movies. it’s a baked beans toastie and staring at the moody sky.

 

from that lunch, you are in those together – the best of your lives is samesiding cafe tables looking out for good faces that cry out to be drawn, and running through vineyards in the rain. 

you have three points of contact at all times. you’re having the best of your lives making ape noises to each other and eyes staring because there’s so much to say in there that can’t be said any other way, and a feeling like you’re taking your first breath or the only sip of water anyone’s ever had, anywhere.

your whole body and every moment it’s ever existed has been sandwich-pressed into that very moment because everything that has ever happened has happened so that you can feel that person’s head on your chest in that moment; the only moment. 

and that makes everything else – every misunderstanding and darkness and misstep – make perfect sense now because someone else sees you in all of it,  because you are both right there as you are meant to be. 

that is the best of your lives.

 

by Sparrokei