Chocolate Chip Cookies

How the dead keep touching us back.

Jun 19, 2026

Gentle note: this piece speaks directly about suicide, grief, and spirit contact.

A fellow Substacker’s piece found me recently.

I was happy to restack it. It was tender, honest, and had that unmistakable quality of someone letting a real piece of life rise to the surface.

But as I sat with it, something else opened in me.

Because mine were not sugar cookies. Grief shared through sugary morsels, yes, but mine was a wound so deep I haven’t known how to put it to paper in nearly thirty years.

Mine were absolutely chocolate chip, baby.

Ooogey gooey morsels of heaven are where the thread lives for me. The darkness and the sweetness of him still winking from beyond. The scent of them still able to find some sealed doorway in my body all these years later.

And suddenly I was no longer sitting here as the woman I am now. I was back in Houston, on one of those cool fall days where the air feels softer than it has any business feeling, listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, waiting for my best friend to arrive after football practice.

Byron

My sweet, sweet friend.

Byron was beautiful. That enormous smile. Those bright eyes. That whole spark of him, like joy had gotten caught on camera before anyone could tell it to sit still.

We would sing A Tribe Called Quest during class and get scolded because we couldn’t stop giggling. We didn’t flinch at being in trouble, our joy too effusive to contain.

There is a kind of friendship you have when you are fourteen that no adult language can fully hold. It is not defined or explained or placed into proper relationship categories. You just love each other in the way young people do, with your whole unguarded body. You laugh until you can’t breathe. You pass notes. You sing when you’re supposed to be quiet. He farted in class and we all roared at the audacity. You create little rituals no one else understands.

And every day after football practice, I had fresh chocolate chip cookies waiting for him.

That was ours.

My little offering. My after-school devotion. My way of saying, here, you are expected, you are wanted. Here, there is always sweetness waiting for you.

Cookies as an Expression of Love

I had been making those cookies long before Byron.

At first, they were for my dad. A little girl’s way of showing affection. I don’t know that I had the words for love, or tenderness, or wanting someone to feel cared for. But I had butter, sugar, flour, chocolate chips, and the strange little devotion of wanting something warm as an show of love.

And yes, I can see now there was something in that little act of domesticity. Me, at fourteen, trying on roles I didn’t yet understand. Learning how offering could become service. How care could become performance. How easily affection could braid itself into being useful, pleasing, good.

I don’t say that to diminish it.

The love was real.

But so was the shape I was beginning to practice.

Both of us were practicing versions of adulthood still too big to fit inside. Him as the assumed NFL star his family wanted him to be. Me as the happy lil homemaker, certainly not the vision my parents had for me, but maybe my own little rebellion all the same.

Domesticity as devotion. Sweetness as nearness. Cookies as the only language I knew for wanting someone to feel loved.

The Day Byron Didn’t Arrive

And then one day, he didn’t arrive.

I can remember that day with impossible presence.

You know those moments when time completely collapses upon itself? As if it wasn’t thirty-five years ago, but yesterday. Some part of me is still there, still standing in the same room, still listening, still waiting, still unable to know that everything is about to change.

The house. The air. The way Houston fall could arrive like a mercy after all that heat, softening everything just enough to make the world feel new. I was listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, my mind and heart being blown open at the same time by the sound of it. The grooves. The funk. The danger. The way music could make something in me feel older than I was, like a door had opened and I had stumbled into a room I didn’t yet know how to name.

I was fourteen and alive in that way only fourteen can be. Music moving through me. Cookies wafting through the kitchen. Waiting for my friend to arrive.

And then the doorbell rang.

Death in the Kitchen

I found our mutual best friend Craig at the door. Tearful, carrying the kind of news no child should ever have to carry.

Byron had hanged himself.

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. My mind could not make any sense of what was being said because the cookies were right there, still warm, the smell of chocolate and butter moving through the house as if life had not just split in two. I remember the scent lofting through me as I left my body completely, because there was no way to remain inside a body that had just been told he was gone.

Not Byron.

Not the boy who was supposed to come through the door.
Not the goofball I had baked for.
Not my friend who brought so much joy.

Not him.

There are moments the body cannot metabolize. The mind tries, God bless its frantic little clipboard, but it can’t reach far enough. It can’t hold the before and after at the same time.

Before, the cookies were waiting.

After, Byron was gone.

And somewhere between those two impossible realities, I was standing in my house, smelling the sweetness and feeling something forever break.

A Grief That Was Loud

The funeral was held in a Black Baptist church, and there I was, a white girl sitting front and center, my tears on display for all to see.

Until that moment, Byron’s skin color had never been considered. He was Byron. My friend. My heart and my laughter.

But in that room, I became aware of all I didn’t know.

The room was full of the Lord. Full of grief. Full of sound and life and devotion. People expressing what they felt without restraint, without apology. A culture of mourning so present and unfamiliar to me that I felt both held by it and completely out of place inside it.

I have never witnessed that before or since.

Grief, in that room, was not tucked politely into tissues or swallowed down so everyone could remain composed. It moved. It sang. It wailed. It had a voice. It had a body. It was allowed to exist… gloriously.

We were placed directly behind his casket on the dais, facing the rest of the congregation, as if the tragedy of his death alone was not enough for my little nervous system to hold. There I was, seated before everyone, facing a whole congregation full of life and God and grief, while the body of my best friend rested in front of me.

And I remember looking at him.

The Black Thread

I remember seeing that the embalmer had not been able to keep his lips closed, and there was this fine line of black thread trying to hold his lips together.

It haunts me.

Because even in death, it felt as though Byron could not quite be contained. Even trying to make him look peaceful, presentable, proper, his body was still telling some truth no one could fully manage.

That thin black thread.

Trying to hold shut what had once been laughter.
Trying to hold closed the mouth that sang with me in class.
Trying to hold still the boy who had been so alive.

That black thread was not the thread of Aka.

Not yet.

It was the thread of grief.

The feeble human attempt to hold shut what death had torn open. To make the body behave. To make the lips stay closed. To make the story look peaceful enough for everyone to survive the viewing. To erase his smile… and somehow immortalize him as serious, as something he most certainly wasn’t.

But grief doesn’t close that way.

It does not submit to presentation. It does not become tidy because someone has stitched the mouth shut.

That thin black thread became the first knot in me. A grief-knot. A place where love and horror and disbelief cinched themselves together so tightly that I couldn’t bake those dang cookies for years.

Before I knew the Aka as thread, before I knew the field as relationship, before I understood that what is truly woven does not disappear, I knew that knot.

I knew what it was to have something alive in me bound closed by grief.

When Writing Gave Grief a Body

And I suppose, as all writers do, young and old alike, I wrote about it.

In my English class, I wrote about Byron, the cookies, the grief. I lamented my inability to bake them anymore.

The devastation still stuck in my body and somehow braided with those delicious little morsels. Chocolate chips had become record. The scent had become a doorway. The act of baking had become unbearable.

It was no longer just butter, sugar, flour, and chocolate.

It was waiting. It was shock. It was the day he did not arrive. It was death in the fuckin’ kitchen.

So I wrote about it, because there was nowhere else for it to go.

And I guess that was the first time I was truly celebrated for my writing. My teacher shared my piece with the class while hot tears streamed down my face. I don’t remember feeling proud exactly. I think pride would have required more distance than I had. I felt exposed. Seen in a way I had no capacity to manage at fourteen.

Something private had been carried through language and placed in the room, and people felt it. I was seen, which I so deeply craved, but I was honored not for my words alone but for the pain I was in.

That was the first time I understood that writing could do something.

Not perform. Not decorate. Not simply tell a story.

Writing could carry what the body could not. Writing gave my grief somewhere to live outside of me. Writing could take the thing that had nowhere to go and let it move through the room.

But baby, I was truly never just a writer.

Writing the Unseen into Form

That is the part I can see now.

The writing was not the whole path. The grief I wrote ignited my path.

Byron’s death did not only awaken my voice. It opened the veil.

Freshman year of college, with Byron’s loss still imprinted in my tender reality, I felt like I needed to go home to “free” him, to help him cross to the other side. For I believed he was somehow stuck... in that unknown place in between when a soul isn’t fully at peace. I didn’t have the language then, no way to understand how even I knew this. I didn’t know the word psychopomp and had no way to name what I thought needed doing.

So I made the cookies, spoke with him, and stayed up late into the night trying to prepare myself to help him release whatever still bound him to this side.

A Garbage Bag Full of Notes

That night I was going through a garbage bag of notes. A literal garbage bag, babe. Remember those? The folded notes we used to pass in class, stuffed into backpacks, slid across desks, written in pen and pencil and whatever color marker happened to be nearby. The sacred correspondence of teenagers before every thought became a text.

Well… we Cancers are not exactly known for letting these things go. So I kept them. All of them, apparently.

A plastic bag full of proof that we had been alive together.

I sat there going through those notes, holding the paper remains of a friendship that death had interrupted but not erased. When I found one from Byron.

When the Other Side Answered

The moment I touched it, my entire room went dark. Just my room. I froze.

And then, because even in terror I was still somehow me, I talked to him. Jokingly, trembling a little, I asked him to turn the lights back on.

And they did!

So I began reading again with shaking hands, trying to be brave enough to keep going. When the lights went out again.

This time not just in my room, but in the whole house.

I knew it was him. I knew my sweet friend was there. I was frightened, yes, but there was also some part of me that was not surprised at all. The contact had been made. Love still existed and the thread had been touched.

And then… damn… it happened again.

Kid you not… not once. Not twice. Three times, eventually taking out the power for the entire block.

By then, bravery had left the building. I crawled into bed that night knowing contact had been made, but deeply frightened by it, even though I knew it to be my sweet friend.

And this is the thing people don’t always understand about spirit contact. It can be loving and terrifying at the same time. Not because the beloved is frightening, but because the veil answering back is enormous.

Because the dead being near rearranges your entire understanding of what reality is. Because when the unseen touches the seen, even with love, the body trembles.

Byron the Eternal Jester

The next morning, I told my parents what had happened.

Without skipping a beat, Dad said, “Byron was just fucking with you.”

And there it was. My father, completely unfazed.

Not concerned that I was losing my mind. Not trying to explain it away. Not patting me on the head with some tidy little rationalization. Just Byron being Byron.

And then my dad told me his own experiences with him.

Byron had died only a few blocks from my house, and Dad said our home was the place Byron would return to over and over again.

My dad, the reluctant sensitive, had been talking with Byron for years.

This man, who would never have described himself in any of the language I now live inside, had long been in relationship with my dead best friend. Quietly tending what I thought I had come home to tend. Quietly speaking with him. Quietly helping him cross.

I thought I was coming home as an inexperienced little psychopomp to help Byron. Instead, Byron opened a door between my dad and me.

Family Ties

A door into conversations we had never had before. A door into the sensitivities that had been living in my family for generations. A door into the truth that indeed I see ghosts and maybe my father feels shit, too.

Crazy, yes, but also my precious, naive lil fix-it self. But Byron was helping me come home… come closer to my dad.

Helping both of us name a thread that had already been alive in the house, in us, in the lineage, for years.

And this is what I know now as the Living Akasa.

Not as a concept. Not as some spiritual aesthetic. Not as a pretty idea of “the field” that we reach for when we want life to feel more meaningful.

This.

A note touched.
A room going dark.
A house answering.
A block losing power.
A father saying, without a flicker of doubt, “Byron was just fucking with you.”
A dead friend becoming the bridge between the living.

That is relationship restored.
That is contact that never dissolves.

The Thread Was Always There

Years after the funeral, when I found his note and the lights went out, something in that old black thread loosened.

Not because the grief disappeared. But because the thread changed.

What had been stitched shut in horror became contact. What had lived as a knot in my body began to reveal itself as relationship.

That is the field making itself known through what love has already woven.

A thread lit up, and everything that had lived between us was still there. Not because I had carried it perfectly. Or because my father had explained it correctly. Or because Byron had vanished into some abstract idea of peace.

Because the relationship was real.
Because the contact was real.
Because something had been woven in the field between us, and what is genuinely woven does not simply disappear.

It waits.

Not dormant.

Alive.

I think about those cookies now and how I couldn’t bake them for years. How grief braided itself into sweetness until sweetness became unbearable. How the body remembers what the mind tries to file away. How a smell can become a doorway, a recipe can become a reliquary, and chocolate chips can hold death and devotion in the same bite.

For years, I thought the story was that I became a writer because I had to write my grief.

And sure, yes. That’s partially true. But it is not the whole truth.

The deeper truth is that grief taught me contact.

Grief made me write. Writing gave the grief a body. And the body of that grief opened the veil.

Byron was one of the first dead I ever loved. One of the first losses that anchored itself into my nervous system. One of the first threads that showed me writing, grief, the body, and the spirit world were never separate for me.

Of course this was my path.

The girl who wrote through hot tears would become the woman who writes about the field beneath reality.
The girl who couldn’t bake cookies would become the woman who understands that the body keeps record.
The girl frightened in the dark would become the woman who sits with the unseen as naturally as breath.
The girl who thought she needed to help her friend would become the woman who understands that relationship never truly ends when love has made architecture in the field.

And Byron.

Byron Never Left

My Byron.

He sits on my altar now. No longer as memory, but as ancestor.

I found exactly the right frame for him— gold and gilded with snakes for that dear lil Scorpio, and placed him with my other ancestors. And as I did, I saw a version of him come forward. Not the fourteen-year-old boy frozen in tragedy. Not only the friend whose death shattered something in me. But Byron as he is now, eternally.

Strong. Powerful. An Orisha in his own right.

A brother. One who meets me in the spiritual, having developed and grown on that side as I have developed and grown on this one.

Equal. Matched. Present. I don’t know that I had ever let myself imagine that before.

That the dead evolve too.

That the ones we lost are not only preserved in the age they left us. That the boy whose lips were held shut by black thread could become a mighty presence on the other side. That my goofy-ass friend could become part of my spirit squad.

The laughter did not end. The cookies were not only grief. The darkness was not to be feared. The sweetness that remains.

He is still fourteen in the photo on my altar. Still that radiant beaming smile. Still the boy I never forgot.

But he is also beyond that now.

An ancestor.

A bestie on the other side. One who still holds, guides, and protects me. One who still winks from beyond.

And maybe that is the part I needed to remember today.

A stranger’s sugar cookies opened the door. But mine were chocolate chip.

Warm from the oven on the day he didn’t arrive. The scent that carried me out of my body. The ritual of sweetness I couldn’t touch for years. Mine were the offering that became grief, and the grief that became writing, and the writing that opened the path.

The dead are not gone simply because the body leaves.

What is real does not need us to remember it in order to remain alive.

It lives in the field between. In the notes we keep. In the food we make. In the beyond touching you directly. In the family who feels. On the dang altar where the boy becomes ancestor.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?