by sheabutter
One of my friends recently fed me her homemade jello. I really liked it even though I’m not allowed to have it anymore. It happened last Saturday night when my friends and I were doing the usual hangout; I kept saying really funny, insightful jokes and everyone was laughing all over the place. But as the brightest stars burn out the fastest, I suddenly grew weary. For sustenance my friend handed me a tupperware full of neon green globs, which I concluded were some sort of non-alcoholic jello shots.
Not to sound like a 1950s housewife, but I blacked out (spiritually, not drunkenly) upon first bite. My old flesh fell away and I became like a newborn baby with the soul of an eagle. I awakened and looked at my friend, a.k.a. this jello’s God. How could such a delicacy hail from a Coolidge triple dorm? The recipe is a secret family heirloom, instructing one to boil instant Jell-O mix, lime flavor, and then add extra gelatin to make the jello thick and resilient. This provides a nice struggle against the teeth. I especially liked how fearless I felt in eating it. If you don’t chew them, each piece just kind of slithers down the esophagus with minimum energy input required, and you can eat a bunch really fast without choking or ever really feeling full. This liberates one from social constructs such as “moderation” or “blood sugar” in a particularly fabulous way.
The jello had been refrigerated in little plastic solo cups and cut in half, so that each was a semi-circle shape and looked like a quarter moon. As a fan of the moon, this made me glad. As a hypothetical giant eating the moon over and over again, this made me powerful.
by bemmy
The green color refracted the rays from nearby string lights and made the jello glow in the dark a little bit and look like aliens. I appreciated my friend’s consistency with the intergalactic theme. It added an unexpected element of fun which other snacks usually only pretend to have. And according to color theory, green is a cool color, as is blue. Blue is the color of most water. Therefore the jello was very cold and hydrating, making it so that I didn’t have to drink water for twenty-four hours after my last glob of the night. If I inquired into regularly-scheduled jello from my friend, I could eliminate fluids from my diet altogether, thus transcending the basic “needs” of my human form so that I may become a more pure vessel for further jello consumption.
But while pondering this I kind of began pacing, and my stream of thought was disrupted when I collided with a chair. Ugh! So brittle and nonconforming! So unlike the little gelatin morsels which had filled me with an eagle-like glee only moments prior. This piece of furniture was a mere solid, disallowing my body to pass through its frame. Why must it contradict me? Having witnessed the chair push me, my friend offered me some water. But liquid is weak, with its feeble molecular bonds and lack of structural perseverance. I much rather preferred some jello or any gelatin-adjacent thing, so long as it was neither too liquid nor too solid. But when I declared this to my friends, they said I wasn’t allowed to have any more jello because I was “not being normal enough” about it and was “scaring” Emma.
So now I’m conscious of being locked in a physical plane that only formally recognizes three states of matter, which is probably the one downside of my friend’s special family jello. Other than that I strongly recommend trying it, if you can find it!