A bag of chocolate chips. A massive 72 ounce bright yellow Chip-it bag intended to sit in your pantry for that rainy day when you decide to make chocolate chip cookies or brownies. This is where it always begins.
We are sitting at the dining room table. Our plates are empty but our conversation is far from it. So out comes the bag of chocolate chips. And out pours the curious questions and introspective analyses. Reflections on our younger selves and inquiries about who those girls will become.
Because I remember in middle school, making chocolate chip cookies with my friend. And I took a video of her mixing a stick of still-wrapped butter into the flour mixture. And all of a sudden, both of us are on the floor, at a loss for words because our laughter took over.
And the laughter carried into the night where we sat in her living room, with multiple bags of candy and a large, metal bowl of movie-theater style popcorn. It was freshman year of high school. Our crazy Friday night plans entailed eating all of those snacks in front of the TV screen which displayed Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens dancing through sprinklers in the second High School Musical Movie.
And then I am in the communal kitchen in my first year of university residence hall, stirring the little chocolate chunks into brownie mixture. Despite being fully aware the brownies are not going to bake in the repulsive shared oven used by the three hundred other first years in the building, we eagerly pour the mixture into a 8×8 pan. While we left the brownies to make their best attempt at baking, we made our way back to the bright blue TV room where we resumed watching Joey and Chandler on the screen.
And while we never made it through more than two seasons of Friends in residence, we are on the fourth season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (it’s not that long and complicated of a name once you say it enough times, I swear) in our second year apartment. Having migrated to the floor at this point in the night, the bag of chocolate chips is wide open, positioned directly in between the two teenage twenty year old girls who wish they could live on the carpet forever.
And the bag of chocolate chips is always there. At the table, as I attempt to untangle the mess of emotion-driven thoughts that are trying to escape from my brain. On the floor, as we think twenty years into the future, wondering what our lives will look like. On the couch, as we try to determine how to use our potential to pursue a passion. And sometimes, only sometimes, in the kitchen. To make banana bread, with chocolate chips to outline a face, placed atop of the freshly baked treat.
And as these little dollops of chocolate have been the key ingredient to so many moments in my life, so were the people I shared them with.