Prithika's piece

I’ve never had a particularly high spice tolerance. That’s not to say I never ate spicy foods, I just ate them with a giant pitcher of water by my side, as I’m not a huge fan of milk. Anyway, for as long as I can remember, I’ve never been a fan of condiments either. I don’t really like ketchup since it tastes cloyingly sweet to me and I personally think mustard just tastes weird. That said, I didn’t hate condiments, I was just deterred away from trying a lot of them because of my distaste for the more common ones. One of the ones I stayed away from was Sriracha. I tend to stay away from most hot sauces in general, I just think every time you put hot sauce on anything you run the risk of masking all the flavor with an unholy amount of spice. At the same time, I wasn’t really thinking about any of that when my friends offered to make grilled cheese sandwiches at 4 in the morning. I happily approved of their decision. However, I was less happy when she pulled out the Kraft American ch...

It was an uneventful December evening and my mom and I were going to my brother’s school to pick him up. He was around ten at the time and went to my old elementary school. It was about ten minutes away and like usual, I spent most of the time trying to connect my phone to the car’s audio system and pick the perfect song for the mood at the time. Usually, it’d come from my winter Spotify playlist, but sometimes I like to switch it up and look for some new music. Before I knew it, we were in the parking lot of the school. Barkstall Elementary School. I walked outside. The playground looked different, I think they did renovations or something. There was no one on the equipment, it was empty. It was also cold outside, not weather suitable for having fun outside on some metal bars. I remember the tree in the corner where my friends and I would sit and eat lunch. There were a couple of new benches and you could see a small annex in the back of the school. It kind of looked like a sh...