What are your desert island foods? Let’s say you only get three—and let’s pretend, for the sake of this exercise, that we can abandon all ideals of nutrition and health (by which I mean, you don’t need to pick the three that would actually best keep you alive for the rest of your days).

My answer would have been different over the years, and each one serves as a barometer of various points of my life, the foods themselves being signals of a flood of memories and moments.

I start to drink coffee in earnest when I graduate from college. At my first job—as an intro-level advertising associate—I caffeinate like a real New Yorker: like a ritual, like sustenance as useful as dinner. I take the elevator up to the 20th floor of a sprawling, faded building smack in the middle of Times Square and drop my bag, stuffed with running shoes and a dog-eared novel and tangled headphones, onto my desk. I quickly make my way past rows of open cubicles to my friend Caroline’s desk: identical to mine with its jumble of candy-colored pens and tubes of chapsticks and piles of paper all askew, printed with months’ worth of status reports, their rows of Excel data marching endlessly across the white pages.

I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Twice, in college, I thought it might be an interesting thing to try on, in the manner that one is constantly auditioning new habits around that age—mimicking the crowd around you and seeing what sticks—much like pulling on skinny jeans instead of bootcut or listening to a different kind of music or drinking espresso when you’ve only ever had milky, sweet coffee.

One poorly performed drag (a too-sharp inhale followed by an agonizing minute of doubled-over coughing on the tiny balcony outside my dorm room while my friend Peggy laughed so hard she almost fell over the railing) and my smoking career came to an abrupt end before it even began.