#the tristamp food conversation dealt me 1 d20 damage it really could not have come at a worse (or better) time

[rithmeres]

Hello Bryn so I started following you for your Trigun art (love love love ‘em) but your spring rolls pic just gave me so much personal and Trigun feels… sorry I’m about to ramble.

So my good friend is Viet and we lived together during Covid lockdown. We made and ate SO MUCH Viet food. It really is a whole event. A participatory art. I live alone now and I miss eating as a communal ritual.

Which reminds me of that Stampede scene where Vash finally started eating again “I deserve to eat, right?” They were eating together too—all of them, including the three random dudes that were on the sideline. There’s just something so natural and comforting about sharing meals; it’s making me kind of sad because Vash often had to eat alone (ex. when he first came to ship 3 and when he roamed around the desert). Vash was hungry for a family/community and now I can see that being one of the points of episode 4.

Happy eating together!!!

i feel the same way 😭😭 sharing food isn’t just about food, it’s healing. to be welcomed in, to be looked after, to participate together in the creation and consumption of what makes us so human

my roommate of four years was viet (i can’t even call her a roommate, we were so much more than that, she’s family) and she helped teach me how to cook and for us food wasn’t just what we ate, it was what we did. it was how we loved.

i’ve never seen someone eat so much in my life, countless shared meals, whether it was just the two of us or we were cooking for thirty other people, howl’s-moving-castle-breakfasts on weekends, hurried dinner leftovers scarfed down in the car while i drove the 55, hours-long hot pot feasts until we’re sweating and stuffed, wicked cold ice cream eaten on the curb downtown as midnight approaches, entire rainy mondays spent making phở, sandwiches with too much maggi seasoning packed in paper bags for hikes, inviting the boys over to gorge on wafer-thin bánh xèo, she’d chop tomatoes for my bruschetta because the smell of them made me sick and i would juice lemons for her when her hands were chapped and bleeding. and i’ve never had an easy relationship with food but something about lyss made eating feel so simple and right.

since she moved away and i eventually moved too i don’t have that same community anymore and i’ve struggled to eat well since losing it. i didn’t know what i had until it was gone. she never forced me to eat or chided me for not eating, she would just make really good food and share it with me. and i would eat it. i could eat it. eating was easier when she was around. so making dinner tonight was like a ritual, putting on the apron she gave me and making spring rolls for the first time in months and accidentally pouring out too much fish sauce just like she would do; and even though i don’t get to share spring rolls with her anymore, the time and the food that we shared together has changed me. and it’s okay. it’s easier to let myself eat and laugh when i can be the one to provide a meal for the people that i am with now, even if they’re not the people who make it easy, so for now i will do just that and maybe someday again i will be able to cook and eat with someone who makes it unburdensome.

#the tristamp food conversation dealt me 1 d20 damage it really could not have come at a worse (or better) time #local tumblr user repeatedly knocked flat by carefully handled themes of shared meals and disordered eating in anime #i have. an entire video about this thing exactly #personal #lyss tag