Content Warnings: alcohol use, isolation
To my closest friend,
How are you, at that dinner table surrounded by those who have long passed? You have not come to this restaurant for quite some time, but it is exactly how you remember it. The not spicy mapo tofu, bland rice noodles with beef, the spicy salted squid that you once proved your mettle with by stacking on all the pepper seeds you could scrape up, it all tasted the same. You claimed this to be your favorite restaurant once. Yet as the years went on you realized your dad simply never took you to many different restaurants, and now you fancy yourself above the banal cuisines that you were made to overindulge in. That isn’t the reason you’re not eating much, however. You feel slightly ill. You’re hoping no one notices how uncomfortable you are right now.
The people who left long ago, but are now very quickly, very temporarily visiting for only so long as it was necessary, speak around you. Laughing, catching up. One brings up the topic of their best memories growing up, and somehow that stings even more than when they asked what you were up to, the only answer you could muster a strained smile and a shrug.
They go around, speaking of events long past now tinged rosy with nostalgia. Someone brings up old in-jokes. Another wonders how this person must be doing now. They laugh at how many of them likely won’t be around when the youngest is going through the rest of high school. One speaks of her burgeoning plans to move out of her parent’s house, with some potential opportunities already in the works. They’re reminiscing of times and places they’ve long departed, someplace they once enjoyed but no longer need.
That isn’t where you’re at. You can’t speak in past tense, not when you have never left the once warm fireplace of yesterday. You poke at the embers when you know the fire will never reignite. You don’t know how to leave that darkened house, even when everything around you decays and disintegrates and rots.
So you can’t offer up your “favorite childhood memory”. You can barely listen without making your misery plain on your face. You want to spend time with them, but you also have no common ground with them any longer. Have they left you behind, or did you allow them to go on ahead?
You can try to wash it away with rum or your distraction of choice. You’ll still be there, in that dilapidated hollow of days long gone. And you know it’s because you never wanted to leave.
