Breakfast Sandwiches as a Love Language

A lot of my best college memories so far involve sitting in my dorm room with Isabella. Tiredly ordering a pizza in the middle of the night, sharing an anime that she’d loved in her childhood, me making coffee for her and her bringing a breakfast sandwich for me, relentlessly teasing each other to the point that it felt mean (this was due to projected jealousy; we’ve always admired each other in different ways and it used to come out bitterly. We’ve since established a much more loving relationship, which I can talk about in another post. We still use this meanness in loving ways, like one day I slept over and she woke me up by slamming the door open and yelling, “Wake up mofo I burned your coffee,” and I drowsily walked into the kitchen to find a spread of delicious sandwiches set up for us).

I met Isabella my freshman year when neither of us had any genuine friends and I was quick to label her as my best friend, partially because of a desperate need for connection and partially because I always knew I’d find that connection in her. At the same time, I envied her and her privileges and she envied me and mine. We had a complicated relationship for our first year knowing one another—we built a bitter closeness that I’ve never had with anyone else due to how strange it was, but there’s always been a profound love underneath that we had to chisel away to get to over time. We’ve always been vulnerable but not about the way we feel about each other until only a couple months ago.

On one of our many breakfast days in the winter 2021 semester, Isabella once again came over holding two egg and cheese sandwiches. Her arrival woke me up and I promptly began to make our daily oat milk lattes. We moved about this exchange smoothly, thoughtlessly, about two or three times a week. I don’t think I’ve ever told her directly how fondly I hold those times.

She just got out of class and I was getting ready for my first class. Sometimes we talked and sometimes we didn’t. On this particular day, I think we were talking about her current boyfriend, Joey. She was recounting how it was such a funny thing that they met, and she said something that struck me so much that I immediately wrote it down: “There’s just some people that we meet that we end up needing.”

I know that she meant this romantically in reference to her boyfriend. But at the time, I’d been single for about a year and had absolutely no interest in dating due to some immense trauma. I still had a lot of love to give; I always have. And I turned to platonic love to distribute that. As Isabella was my closest friend at the time who understood me like no other, I put most of that love into her, along with other close friends. That made these moments all the more intimate and magical; she was one of the people that I ended up needing.

Back in those moments, when I was first learning to put my friendships first after putting romantic relationships first my whole life, I began to grow comfortable and even fond to the idea of growing old solely with platonic love. Although I have a loving boyfriend now, I still believe that the contentment I’ve found in friendships would still be more than enough to carry me through life. I found my boyfriend when I didn’t need him, and I think that makes our relationship even stronger.

Recently, only about two weeks ago, Isabella and I were sitting on her couch and talking about our personal worldviews and philosophies about life. I don’t have a lot of thoughts on these things because I have a very existentialist point of view, but she puts a lot of thought into her life philosophy, so when we have these conversations, I mostly just sit and listen and provide input when I have something to say. On this day, we’d just finished watching the sitcom on Netflix, The Good Place, and were discussing the Buddhist and Platonic influences in the finale (which I can honestly rant about in another post; if you’re reading this, this is a sign to watch The Good Place immediately). In this show, they had a portrayal of Heaven that’s essentially what most people imagine—everything is good and happy and perfect, and all your dreams come true—but with a small twist. There’s a door in this Heaven, that when you want to, you can walk through and dissipate into the cosmos. No one knows exactly what happens on the other side of the door, but essentially, you die. Walking through this door is a choice; when you’ve done everything you want and need to, you can walk through and be at peace.

Isabella came to a conclusion about this: “Heaven is time,” she told me on this day. “Heaven is just having the time to be with the people you love and do whatever you want and taking your time with everything. There’s no rush to get anywhere or do anything.

“It’s cheesy,” she continued, laughing a bit. “but Heaven to me is sitting on this couch with you and having the time to talk about this for as long as we want.”

I’ve learned a lot of things throughout my friendship with Isabella. We still sometimes do our coffee and sandwich exchange, but there’s much more communication between us now than there used to be. A year into our friendship, we never would’ve admitted that we need each other, nor that Heaven is talking on her couch forever. I met her, and then I needed her. We no longer have to depend on wordless exchanges to express our love; I just tell her.