Own

Night: nearly midnight. The Uber Eats delivery rider biked off up the street and I went left with the sandwich under my arm. It was wrapped in brown paper sheets bearing the brand. Oil or aioli or sauce was seeping from the sandwich into the paper, staining it. I passed the park, noting that the darkest darkness presented to me in that starless scene was the mucky grass, the corpulent heads of the trees.

I got back to the house, shut the front door behind me, kicked off my shoes, and went to my room to eat the sandwich I had carried with me from the nearby outlet. I grunted a greeting at someone I passed on the stairs and they smiled fleetingly.

I sat on my bed, my legs crossed, the sandwich before me on a silver tray which I had taken from the communal kitchen specifically for this purpose. I unwrapped the sandwich eagerly. I intuited that something was off just before folding aside the final layer. I folded it aside, like it was the page of a book, and was dismayed by the sandwich before me. 

It wasn’t mine. I had taken, or been given, the wrong order. There was, I immediately recalled, some misadventure involving an Uber Eats driver. I think my order had been given to him, placed erringly in his large, cubed, heat-tight bag; what should have been given to him had, unfortunately, ended up in my hands.

I didn’t have to try it to know it wasn’t the sandwich which I had not only ordered but constructed- (or which the sandwich artist had constructed according to my design). It couldn’t be my meatball marinara, with melted cheese, olives, jalapenos, onions, peppers, garlic aioli. Where was the red rim of excess meatball sauce, the dripping overflow of the garlic sauce?  With decorous suspicion, I peeled upward a corner of the bread, peeking at what was inside. 

What was within was, I can say with confidence, the most disgusting sandwich imaginable. How anyone sane could have the self-disrespect to order it let alone to eat it, confounded and amazed me. I won’t describe it in detail- it makes me feel queasy- but I will say that tuna was the central event; nothing with which said tuna was layered, combined, garnished harmonised with it, consonantly shall we say.

I couldn’t believe my unluckiness. I was hungry and this was a horrible set-back. Not only had I walked away with a sandwich other than the sandwich I had ordered, but the sandwich I had walked away with was veritably disgusting, stomach-turning, I could not conceive of a worser, more odious marriage of flavours and textures.

I contemptuously binned the sandwich. The empty silver tray before me, I sat on my bed and sulked. I cried, silently.

It was mysterious to me. How could anyone like that sandwich? How could anyone want to eat that? It occurred to me just how impossible it was for me to see the world through another person’s eyes. I imagined the figure, faceless and anonymous and mysterious, of the sandwich eater, the one whose sandwich I had just discovered, been appalled by, and discarded. How would they feel about my sandwich? My sandwich was surely many times more appealing than their tuna fiasco. Surely they could not be repulsed by my sandwich as I was by theirs. I hadn’t come up with my sandwich: I had stolen the specific stipulations of the order from someone else. 

I saw the man, a tall, dark-skinned man in bright, white trainers and a bright, red hoodie, as he had stood before me in that queue nearly nine years ago, murmuring this expert, artful order at the sandwich artist, building the sandwich before him. Hearty Italian bread, meatball marina, sliced cheese, toasted, peppers, onions, jalapenos, olives. Garlic aioli. Bit of pepper. I had watched and listened to the sandwich’s construction, decided it was delicious, decided to plagiarise the recipe, found that the sandwich was indeed delicious, and, since then, I had never ordered anything but. I was happy then. It was a good time.

I looked at the bin. The sad bin. The sandwich moaned from with it, it made to me many mute and sorrowful appeals for mercy, for reconsideration, for attention. 

I attended, wondering what the story was, if any, behind that disgusting sandwich, why tuna, why those toppings and those two clashing sauces had been the choice, the free choice, of this person I didn’t know and would never know but with whom I was profoundly connected for a time.