Tell me what you want but there is something the same about all pizza places. Marzella’s up the street smells just like Mama’s in Kutztown.

I don’t eat pizza anymore but my tongue and my nose tell me that it still tastes like cardboard boxes and white rooms without furniture in a house that would grow around my brother and I from my father’s primer coats and uncle hammered support beams.

I have seen the walls of our house bloom with bathroom mirrors and beam with blocks of color in the living room. I have seen a forest grow from my closet and an ocean emerge from behind the steel bunk bed in Billy’s room. I’ve seen a kitchen bleed yellow from where I used to sit and eat fruit snacks on my grandfather’s lap. I have a porch put on lipstick.

I always remember the same night and sometimes I wonder if it really happened or if it is the summation of an eight-year-old girl’s desires. My father and I with paint rolls in what would become a jungle in my room. We ate pizza from the box in the center of the floor. That was back when I ate the cheese separate from the pizza– rolling up the blanket of mozzarella to eat like string cheese. I poked the doughy– tomato sauce slick surface of the dismantled pizza.

“Why do you do that?” my father asked.

“It’s squishy,” I said.

“You could just get it without cheese.”

“It’s more fun this way.”

He passed me his crust which I swaddled in  marinara.

I know that it’s weird but I remember my shower I took that night. I remember sitting in the tub– pretending I was in a rain forest– scraping tomato sauce and white primer paint from my fingernails.