A Tsunami Documentary and Louisville’s Finest Chocolate Cake
By: Bre D'Alessio South
Tags: Mental Health, Friendship, Life Lessons, Growing Up, Stories

A Tsunami Documentary and Louisville’s Finest Chocolate Cake

Photo by Heng Films on Unsplash

Tsunami waves become stronger after the first initial wave hits. The first wave is typically not the most impactful.

Emily and I were middle school acquaintances who became high school besties. We both fit the profile of not popular but not considered nerd level. Average height, medium-length brown hair and glasses that we quickly switched out for contacts so we didn’t have the dreaded metal on metal effect: braces plus glasses.

Emily was smart beyond her years. You can credit the fact her biological parents were a chemical engineer and a Mayo Clinic, MIT-educated medical doctor. But she never gave off a know-it-all vibe, she would just hint at larger measures of insight. A way to show she knew more but with no ego attached.

Our routine Friday night in high school consisted of a sleepover, almost always at my house.

Her house, an old Victorian model that dated back to the 18th century, sat in the middle of the woods within Louisville, Kentucky. It was a house that held hidden doors, servant stairs, and stories of mysterious liquids running down mirrors. To this day we wish we had taken a sample to figure out exactly what the liquid was at the time of discovery. I assumed ghost juice, she assumed faulty piping.

Tsunamis continue to affect people long after the waters have receded.

The house would experience lights flickering on and off throughout the day. A hairbrush once soared through the living room. Her sister even heard a little kid crying while in the kitchen, turning around to realize she was all alone. The ghosts that perhaps lived in those walls did little to rattle the tension between her mother and stepfather.

For Emily, my house served as an escape from that world. That house in the shadows that held bigger conversations our 16-year-old minds couldn’t fully comprehend. My house, a bit of peace and quiet which kept doors unlocked and conversations flowing. Our open floor plan gave way to high ceilings and warm lights. The family conversations held at the dinner table filled with laughter and positive intent. My parents, always ready for a hug and kept their mess, at least to me, behind closed doors.

A house unlike her home deep in the woods. The slammed doors, the obsessive spending, the pile of excessive things that cluttered each room. The notes her siblings would slide under mom’s door when she was sick and couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. “Hope you feel better soon, Mom,” scribbled in crayon and taped to a locked door.

Tsunami waves can be as huge as 100 feet.

In my house, we turned to TV and late-night Oxygen shows to pass the time together. “Bliss” and “Talk Sex with Sue Johanson” were two of our routine favorites. Who knew you could learn so much from an older woman with a treasure pleasure chest? We snacked on treats and ate onion dip until our stomachs were sick. My mom checked in here and there to see if we needed anything before bed. We were quick to change the channel whenever we viewed late night content, a muscle memory of keeping my finger hovered over the remote just in case.

One night, my parents home from dinner out, brought us a coveted chocolate cake back for a treat. This giant slice of chocolate delicacy, perfectly separated with thin chocolate icing and crumbled chocolate bits to finish. We carried the delicate piece of art upstairs to my room, situating the two of us between the Styrofoam prize. Forks in hand we began to cut through the sponge of chocolate scent. We settled to watch a recent documentary on the 2004 tsunami that had destroyed Sri Lanka.

We can only remember pieces of the documentary. The devastation after the wave came, the impact of what was left. The missing. All the missing family members that would never be found again. I remember the taste of cake on our lips, the sensation of tasting something so delicious while watching disaster in front of us.

We both remember one moment in detail from that documentary. The story of the couple in a boat, somewhere out in the middle of the ocean. Unknowingly the earthquake would trigger right underneath them. A small pulse would ripple under their boat. They felt it and saw it before it took off. That earthquake, that ripple, would change the rotation of the earth and history.

It takes about 15 to 20 minutes after the earthquake for the wave to come next.

Emily and I sat with our bellies full and our forks empty. Mind fucked by the education that was shared with us. Did they just say the tsunami caused time to change? Yes Yes. The tsunami caused the earth rotation to change and changed time. We folded the empty Styrofoam box, with forks hanging out of our mouths, carted ourselves downstairs to clean up during a commercial break.

Recently on a phone call connected between twenty plus years of friendships, marriage, and moves across the country, we somehow got on the topic of the ‘tsunami documentary night.’

“Why was that documentary so enthralling?” I asked Emily, our friendship enduring the common path frantic texts, birthday phone calls and a few long-distance moves. Emily would add an MD to her name and would quietly say goodbye to her mother a year before her marriage.

“I really don’t know,” she offered. “Something about it stuck though. Considering we still talk about it all these years later.”

Regions in tsunami danger zones often have warning systems in place to give people as much time to evacuate as possible.

My dad was in the kitchen getting water from the tap, we filled his ears with our most recent learnings: earthquake, tsunami, time change, rotation. We spit out the words in a chocolate high as he nodded kindly to our excitement. He asked deeper questions about our scientific discovery, what did we mean exactly by time change? How did rotation cause the time to change? We both stood there deflated. Well, we aren’t sure how the trigger was caused but it made sense when they explained it on TV. He chuckled and told us to have a good night as he turned back to the hallway.

We shrugged and ran back upstairs to finish our education lesson on tsunamis and time. We sat on my bedroom floor, the crisp carpet under our legs as we discussed how time shifted, or did they say time stopped? And this change happened because of one major moment. Imagine one moment changing the way the rest of the world would continue forward. One effect to set off a series of other after-effects. A catalyst to a larger boom. We wondered how that couple felt, now looking back, as they realized history was happening directly underneath them. How often do we witness something so catastrophic from the safety of our personal lifeboat?

It only takes 15 to 20 minutes for the wave to strike after the first quake.

The documentary wrapped. No surprise ending and no resolution to what had happened. We carried on with our nightly routine of brushing teeth, washing faces, and climbed into my queen-sized bed. Both of us traded our contacts for our glasses.

We switched from documentary to a friendly face, Sue, and stared in awe as she counseled a woman via hotline on how to navigate loneliness while a boyfriend served out his sentence in jail. The pleasure chest re-emerged from under her desk and a showcase of battery-operated devices were advertised as a friendly solution to not cheat.

Emily and I laughed in unison as we discussed how it would feel if our grandma was Sue. Sue was probably 70 and we didn’t know her background or history in the sexual education field at the time (turns out she was a major queen in sexual reproductive rights), we only saw her as the old lady who gave sex advice late at night. Can you imagine if this was your grandma at Thanksgiving dinner? How wild holidays would be.

We lay in bed until sleep fell on us and I turned off the TV for good. Our stomachs full of sweetness and our minds churning with new education. A few miles east sat Emily’s house, tucked back in the woods, only the moon to light up the wrap-around porch.

The trees stretch their branches across the roof and tap softly on a bedroom window. Somewhere in the house a small rumbling was likely happening.

Perhaps a slammed door or the opening of a bottle. A tiny rumble that would constantly build upon the last one, and with not enough time to prepare, a crash.