VANILLA SHEET CAKE

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 Tallahassee is Florida’s state capital, totaling a population of roughly 194,000. It is home to the Gordo’s Smash, the y-bomb, and juul lung. The city gleamed pretentiously as I drove down Apalachee Parkway, nearing the fallace shaped state capitol and wondering whether there was a metaphor hidden in the architecture. A city: born of anti-socialites and gluttonous, fat men disguised as nobles. The fragrance of pure, undeniable gentrification. And the gentle ASMR of Freecess on a Tuesday night. 

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I had chosen to attend the local Florida State University on a whim, not once visiting the school or the city. My decision could possibly be defined as a visceral cognizance, something born of spontaneity. Maybe it was an act of rebellion. Or maybe I hyper-romanticized running away.

 

It had always continued to bewilder me how individuals could hold such a capacity for contentment. Maybe I was just generalizing. I had never once thought for a second that wherever I was, that was where I needed to be forever. Forever. I told myself that I wanted to look outside my window and see something new everyday. But, also hate the place I ended up in.

 

You could say I was an optimistic skeptic. 

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I lived in a single room at Gilchrist Hall, managing to evade the infamously daunting Salley Hall. Ending up there, as it seemed to others, was a prayer answered by whatever god of whatever religion. I could thank that god for taking pity on my time of suffering and need, but I attribute good instances to my own perseverance, being the incessant emails sent to the housing office to immediately relieve me of my unbearable living situation. 

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There were a few of us on our dorm floor that quickly assembled into a friend group. Gilly Gang, we called it. There was Chrisopher White, an e-boy with a thing for cowboy hats and ravioli. There was Peter Masson, an anime fanatic who dabbled in psychoanalysis. There was Duke Thomas, who I met at 4am one night in the study room wearing sunglasses and eating a Jimmy John’s sandwich. There was Braden Vesp, who I swear to this day is a cartoon character, as I have never seen him without the same dad hat and hoodie. There was Clay Fischer, a “car guy” from Michigan (we all know the type). There was Jakome Bikendi. I hope I spelled his name right. And there was Bill Sadeler, lover of late night Suwannee Room adventures. Late night Swan is what he called it. I had a reputation on my dorm floor as being nocturnal.

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I began my Saturday at 5pm, stirred hastily from my sleep to relentless hammering on my door. I thought, for a second, that maybe it was a maintenance check. Or a bathroom cleaning. The staff on my floor had the tendency of banging on the residents doors so raucously that the residents all the way in McCollum Hall, located on the northwest side of campus, could hear. I quickly dismissed the idea, remembering it was a weekend.

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I answered groggily.

 

“Good morning, my sweet princess,” Peter cooed as some odd form of endearment. He was wearing his lime green t-shirt, the one with the white palm tree patterns, which was enough to signal that we had plans tonight. He shifted for a bit and slicked his hair back.

 

“We’re going to a party. I’ll text you the info.”

 

I moaned and replied with a sharp fine before hastily retreating back into the confines of my room, clutching unto the remains of my morning weariness in hopes that I could sink back into the safety of the REM cycle. God, I hated parties.

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I never understood the need for sensory ephemera through an excessive indulgence in modern vices. Was there catharsis in a loss of control? Did the aftershock of alcohol ever numb it all, after all? I understand more than anyone a desire for over-stimulation, shifting focus from existentially exhausting endeavors to the topical stresses of daily life, yet there was something idle about the collective disposition to live for the weekend. Regardless, I was at the party. Others chased hard dark liquor with darker sink water, swallowing the night. Others spewed slurred “I’m sorries” and drunken promises. Others kissed to a nicotine stained goodnight. I was bored. There was something mundane about the liveliness of a party.  

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A figure gestured for me in the midst of the crowd. Peter I groaned. Giving him a thumbs up, I set out to integrate myself with the masses. It was a birthday party and our choices for sustenance were the usual favors of the college party variety and a large vanilla sheet cake. 

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A familiar face stood in solace on the balcony. My former high school best friend, Tatiana Sidana. She parted her hair down the middle and retired her purple streaks. I could have sworn I saw them tucked away behind her ears for nobody to see, like an inside joke with herself.

 

We had known each other through the worst phases of our lives and had the same worst complexes. We were the Effy Stonem’s of our age, we were the most interesting people in the room, and we were self proclaimed philosophes. We grew apart due to the weathering of time.

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“Whoa, who’s that mysterious girl alone outside on the balcony? What’s she thinking about? What music does she listen to?”

 

She turned, startled, then laughed. “Okay, fuck you.” There was tension, a sitting eruption far from dormancy. The kind of tension when you’re trying to excavate sites of the past and wonder whether those places could ever be revisited. However, it subsided in minutes. She was comfortable and familiar. Just like old times I thought. 

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Somewhere in the background were the galling howls of the drunken youth yelling into the January air. A forgettable face purged the night unto the bathroom floor, just missing aim of the toilet. An Uber stacked more bodies than they should and could fit into their compact Toyota Yaris. The night was dying.

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Tatiana sighed abruptly. “This is fucking awful. We should go to a different party.” She had the tendency to leave interactions ending like an unresolved chord.

 

“Not a big fan of partying.”

 

She paused for a second, then pursed her lips.

 

“Yeah, same. But I still show face anyways.” I’m assuming my lack of understanding was palpable as she continued:

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“The parties are insufferable, but I love vanilla sheet cake.” I didn’t understand what she meant, but I guess her statement had some air of poetic confusion. 

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“One thing I hate about dead space,” I confessed, “is having to realize how empty I am without routine.” 

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We were sitting outside adjacent to the front door of All Saints Cafe one day, an indie coffee shop tucked snugly on Railroad Avenue neighboring Serenity Coffee and Kava. Tatiana grumbled.

 

“Why do they keep changing the WIFI password?”

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“Try cornbread. All one word, lowercase letters.”

 

I had often questioned how I could ever settle. It was unclear whether she heard my sudden slip of vulnerability and I wondered from time to time whether I was actually whole during the days where I was chaotically shifting from task to task. The things I did to occupy my space, I swore, couldn’t have been escapism. But, it was hard to feel content while drowning on the sidewalk. Maybe the same things that filled me up were the same things that were so internally corrosive. There was something deeply paradoxical in the semblance of searching and never finding: a journey without a destination.

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She tapped her fingers to a simple duple metre. 1, 2. 1 and 2 and. I noticed that all of her nails were painted white except her left pinky, adorning the shade of a deep rosewood.

 

“I keep a calendar of the months,” Tatiana said, interrupting the cliffhanger, “with each month being given a color. Like January is white and February is pink and March is green. It’s really just up to us to see the color through.” 

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We tackled the streets of Tallahassee in my Toyota Corolla. Two college kids, fighting dragons, trying to safely navigate through Tennessee Street, going 40 on a 40 during the peak of street racing hours. An extravagant beast flew past me in the form of an all black 2020 Mustang GT. I thank Clay for my limited knowledge on cars.

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Tatiana rolled her eyes. “Showoffs.” She was in the passenger seat shuffling my music library.

 

It had been three months since those same gods of whatever religion brought us together. I could rejoice in their plan for allowing the two of us to find each other once more, but I ascribe our communion to our own practice of free will, whatever that meant to us, and loose chance. She was my best friend, my ride or die. Within those months, we had gone on trips to Chicago, Alabama, Philadelphia. She had seen me eat shit falling down the wet, musky stairs of The Strip on Tennessee Street. We would roll the windows down and stick our middle fingers out at 10 minute intervals during long drives, our own personal symbolism of defiance and freedom. I had formally integrated her into the Gilly Gang, uniting her with my central social circle. We, as she would say so often, re-established a God tier friendship and God tier memories.

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She finally selected All the Luv In My Sick Heart by awfultune. “God, who hurt you?” It was a song that I attached to my ex, but in my defense, it was (and is) still a good song regardless. I was rewriting the memory each time I listened to it.

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“I met him at a pre.”

“Hooooowwww sweet.”

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“I’ll summarize. We talked. We hit it off. Four months later we started dating.”

 

That summer was prospecting. It was golden. We were watching some cheesy romantic film one night and I was laying near the side of the bed next to the wall. There was an awkward gap that I called “the void” because anything that fell into it seemed to disappear.

 

I said: “I’m sinking deeper into the hole.”

 

He asked me if I was being metaphorical or literal. I almost fell off the bed.

 

I guess that night foreshadowed a lot of what we were and what our conclusion would be.

 

Fall came. That’s when I conceptualized that things fell apart. A lot of me disappeared in those last months and I was convinced I fell into that hole and could never come out. 

 

“I guess,” I continued, “I could blame it on him or me or whatever it may be, but shit hit the fan. It sucked, but I didn’t really feel much. Maybe I was so overwhelmed it was numbing. But, it was enough to prompt a sudden fuck it, I’m going to Georgia and drive off on a school day.” That day, I watched the sun melt behind me from my rear view mirror. I was driving down U.S Road 319 and every approaching hill seemed insurmountable. 

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“When I got back I couldn’t pack up all of our shit for the longest time because I was scared of boxing him away with it too.”

 

It might’ve been a quick getaway, or a panicked runaway. I was unsure.  Something about finality is devastating. I have never been good at letting sentiments go. Because I told myself that living in that past, slowly dripping away like honey, is sweeter than trying to get over that hill. Or hills. 

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“Yeah, but you still did get through it. A person to be with for the time, but not forever. Kinda like Tallahassee. And that’s okay, just as long as you’re cultivating optimism.”

 

She always used to say that when we were growing up. Cultivating optimism.

 

I had been quick to disregard any advice to “change my mindset” as cliche. I never knew the self edification that a definite optimism precipitated, and I blame that on reasonable ignorance due to age. But there was truth in her statement, and perspective of the situation is, nonetheless, influential in crafting the ways in which an individual peruses through their experiences of daily life. A space to be for a bit but not forever.  Like the comfort of an overplayed song. To think about a place as never being “right”, whatever that means as an absolute, is both true and false. It will never be right forever. However, for the time being, it could be. 

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There was nothing heroic about searching and wasting away. Squinting through the looking glass of an hourglass. In some way, we are pilgrims. Afraid of straying too close to the edge of the earth. But, we could slow down our pace a little more each day.

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It never really hit me till then.

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It was a different sort of contrast that still had the elements of a perfect harmony. Tallahassee, whatever you were, felt colorful. I remember looking at her in the passenger seat and thought about that calendar she had. “March is green,” I smiled. “Yup. March is green.” We stuck our arms out of the windows, clutching onto the grinning crescent moon in the brilliant pitch black night. And the only thing left ringing through the night were the shrill shrieks of street cars racing against the tune of Camouflage by The Front Bottoms. “Sour but I think I like it, fruit from the profane communion, who knew I would even try it?” We were chasing rainbows in an infinite sky, the road seemed to stretch on for a thousand miles. I guess for once in my life, I was okay with the timeline. For once, it was enough for me to stay in that moment of comfortable assurance. 

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I define Tallahassee not by the physical city, rather the people,  the memories, the routine I fell in love with. So to the people who came, to the people I’ve met, to the people who stayed, and the people who left: I’m settling into you, Tallahassee. It was the impulsive instances where my eagerness for an exciting sort of eclecticism in a place as seemingly dull as Tallahassee takes route, somehow. It was me going off to somewhere new. Or me going off to somewhere familiar. 

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What we self-prophesize is what we work to manifest for ourselves. Tallahassee is a city to stumble into briefly, like a side quest in the main game, not a city to end up in indefinitely. But during that time, make it right. The place offers you something if you are willing to search for it. Like finding vanilla sheet cake at a party.

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All it took was one hit and a shot at the night. I was on my feet but I felt like I was flying. She glanced at the sky.

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“We’ll be alright?”

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We’ll be alright.◆

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Published in the print edition of the March 31, 2020, issue.

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Kristine Castillo has contributed to The New Yorker since 2020. She is the author of, most recently, "Hi LOL Please Let Me Pass Your Class, Thanks Stay Safe."