Written by Genesis Castello
Content Warning: Eating Disorder
I am sitting on my apartment floor craving the taste of my mother’s tostones. Although my brother doesn’t eat them like that, he prefers them softer, sweeter – So it's a treat, to get them handed to me wrapped in grease-stained paper towels and aluminum foil. The salty, hot oil smell of the plantains frying. Made in the hallway of the comically small kitchen we have back home where I could smell all of my mother’s cooking, sometimes burning, even through the haze of incense smoke in my childhood bedroom. I am sitting on my apartment floor craving my mother’s arroz con gandules. Yellow rice and pigeon peas and the bits that burned and stuck to the bottom of our deep, plunging pot that I wish, I wish, I wish I had here with me. Seasoned and stained by decades of making the same dish. My mouth waters thinking of it. My stomach aches for it and I think of what it would take to make it here. A trip to the Jewel-Osco on Ashland. Or a flight to Virginia. Or an order from Nellie’s in Humboldt Park. I am sitting on my apartment floor craving the taste of my mother’s pernil. Slow-roasted pork, greasy, heavy. But it tastes like I am sitting on her lap at a quinceanera when I was six years old and had no idea why I was leaving my island. Before I had any idea how much I could crave my mother’s food when nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing else sounds appetizing at all.
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Genesis Castello lives in Chicago and is a senior at DePaul University, studying English as well
as Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a horror movie enjoyer who adores writing and learning
about all of the strangest and loveliest parts of life. You can find her on instagram @genesisofarc.