My Comfort Food

A memory: It is 2006, and my brother has flown over from college in Korea to visit home. After days of patiently watching him sleep like the dead, he finally takes me to the movies like he promised he would. We walk to the local movie theater on Burrard Street in Vancouver, Canada. Mom has wrapped us in one more layer than necessary and we are both a little sweaty as we trek through the snowy streets. We enter the warm theater and immediately the bright concession stand lures me over. As I approach the stacks of candy and the popcorn machine pumping out fresh yellow popcorn, my brother whispers, “pick anything you want, just don’t tell mom.” I feel as though I’ve won the lottery. For the entirety of my life, I had been surviving under my mother’s whole wheat, brown rice, sugar-free reign over the household. But my brother was paying now. I get a pack of Sour Patch Kids, a box of M&Ms, a Medium size bag of popcorn gleaming with butter, and an apple juice on the side. As I sit with my arms full in the red velvet seats, I am as comfortable as I will ever be. I ask my brother if he wants some of my M&Ms and I am relieved when he says no. 

            After I fell in love with the concession stand at the movies, my brother dutifully took me to the cinema with every visit and allowed me to eat whatever my heart desired. The experiences, although they may not be filled with wholesome food, were ones like no other; they were truly the best kind of dinner and a show that I could imagine. Even now, as he approaches his thirties and I prepare to take on my final year of high school, I am stubborn in my dedication to movie theater junk food. I have come to incorporate my beloved cinema snacks into the changes in my life; whenever I move to a new neighborhood or city, my first order of business is to find a large movie theater with plenty of food for my brother and I to enjoy. Through all the moves, from Korea to Canada to America, knowing that my brother would take me on our secret binge of overpriced yet delicious movie snacks is what always seemed to tether me to some vague sense of security.

             A December or two ago, when my brother and I last went to the movies, I didn’t think about that snowy day and the experience that started our glorious tradition. But as I watched the cars whiz by and the heard explosions blast around me in the darkness of a new theater in a new city, I took solace in the fact that I was experiencing something familiar; that these short moments I spent with my brother were as gratifying as the snacks I got to eat while with him.