BIG FEELS ABOUT HOT NEW CONVERSATION STARTERS I FOUND WHILE RESTORING MY PASSWORD WITH THE CRA:
What was your least favourite food as a child?
We ate potatoes and meat every night. The butcher would call us every time a hunter from the states would leave a dead body, “Do you want half? It’s just going to waste away.” So, for months, we would eat meat of every cut, shape, and size, but cooked in only three ways: roasted, thin-fried, or ground in a little meat grinder for dry meat. We only ate the dry, ground meat at lunch time when mom was at work. It was dad’s delicacy: fluffy mounds of shaved, already once (or twice) cooked meat. It would melt on my tongue. On the days when dad would serve it with fried macaroni and cucumber salad, I died and went to heaven.
My least favourite food was the roast beef due to sheer repetition. I could still wait forever to eat another roast.
What was the make and model of your first car?
We grew up driving a Land Cruiser, rusted and red. The best years of my childhood were tucked neatly inside this tin bucket. We loved it. We would yell and clamour for the “way back”: the spot dad put an extra set of seats where there were none before. It was a party back there. We would drive down long dirt roads bouncing and bumping out of our seats, pretending we were riding rollercoasters.
What is your favourite colour?
My eyes were periwinkle blue when I was born and they stayed that way at least until my third grade school picture, which I can prove by showing you the copy still stuck to my auntie’s fridge. My eyes began to change a little bit and a little bit after that. My mom told me legends of ancestors (my grandma, her cousin Kyle, etc) whose eyes would change—with the weather, with emotion. Sometimes they were blue, sometimes they were green. I met someone recently who had moved here from far away. He told me with an equal mix of awe and humour, “You have yellow eyes.”
They are mostly green now, I haven’t had blue eyes in ten or more years. Like my eyes, I always had a hard time choosing a favourite colour, though I have, at times, said yellow.
Where did you go to school in the sixth grade?
I never really thought about why we were homeschooled. We just were. Later on, long after the downstairs schoolroom—complete with four repurposed desks and a vintage chalkboard—was converted to one sibling’s bedroom, then another, it finally seemed worth the question. Looking back, the timeline makes it all seem a bit obvious: my brother died when I was six years old; the next fall we started learning from home. My mom says that after my brother died they wanted to get every inch of life out of us that they could.
In sixth grade I was probably learning how to write my name in hieroglyphics while sitting cross-legged on the living room floor (I had convinced my mom to let me “major” in ancient Egypt for the year).
We tried to get our work done by 3PM every day; that was when Oprah was on CTV.
What was the name of your first love?
I called her “kindred spirit”. Those of us who were/are closeted call our loves by many such names—imaginary friend, pen pals, etc. I was trying to find a word that defined the aching of my chest and flip flop of my stomach when she was near; how I thought about her hands and that I wanted to hold them.
My second love is named Sam.
Talk soon,
Natahna
The Recommends: Taking your time. Not being okay. <3
Lovely.