My mom makes these really soft and cakey cookies that I love. Once, when I was a kid, I brought them to Sunday School to share. Nobody understood them. They said they were too strange and cakey. After school, I found one on the ground, crushed under a car, tyre marks etched into it. From then on, my family started calling them “Volvo cookies”.</p>
I was excited to get my first iPod. I had to download iTunes to listen to music, but the slow internet of my home stopped with every ring of the phone. I was glued to the progress bar for a week, watching it slowly inch forward. I felt so frustrated every time the phone rang for the whole week! When it finally downloaded it was the best feeling in the world.</p>
Every birthday, Mom bakes a train-shaped Battenberg cake with pink and yellow checkerboxes. On my 21st birthday we all stayed up to celebrate and got quite drunk. At 3 a.m., my Mom gasped—“Oh no, I forgot the cake!" We ate it then, tipsy and intimate. It felt different, more personal. My mom wasn’t just my mom anymore; she was a friend.</p>
<p>Once, I rode a long train ride down to Shangai. At each city we stopped, I ate a different piece of cake and wrote about it on my blog—back when blogs were still a thing. It was an incredible cake journey. But now, the train’s path goes through Russia, and that trip is sealed in the past.</p>
<p>When I first got Tumblr, I wrote all my most private thoughts on it. I loved it. One day, a girl from a class above came up to me to say she loved my post about love. My heart sank as I realized everything I posted was public, exposed. Embarrassed, I deleted it all. Now, I wish I hadn’t.
