Table For One- Unfinished

It’s easy to seat a small girl like me. Table for one, please. Put me in the back, I don’t care. I’ll watch all the people come and go and try to make up stories for them all. I’ll illuminate in my head all the bits of them that they thought no one would notice, but I see because my eyes are open and the drinks are flowing and I have nothing else better to do.  

There's an old man with a dense wallet sitting next to a woman thirty years his junior with skyscraper waxed legs. He spent twenty minutes talking while they waited for their appetizer and the only sounds out of her mouth were “yeah?” and “uh-huh,”. I wonder if that’s the same type of enthusiasm she gives while they’re having sex. I'm surprised that he even finds time to breath as his sentences trail on to forty-plus words. She can’t find a young man rich enough to afford her spending habits and would prefer exchanging her youth for dust and money and cold champagne that she can drink while pretending to be interested in whatever he is rattling on about. The rich man's wife left him for a man who only makes a mere 300k a year. He can't understand why he can buy this young woman's love, but couldn’t convince his wife to stay. Wrapped up in his business, money had always been the other woman. 

There’s a married couple who don’t go out enough—it’s hard with the kids, you know. They have forgotten all the small bits and quirks of the person they sleep in bed with every night and what made them fall in love with each other in the first place. They try to recall, but can only seem to remember what they order on that once-a-month occasion. He gets the salmon with asparagus and forgets that it’s always cold and that she takes a deep breath before she gets in the shower because she always fears it to be too hot. She gets the filet mignon salad and forgets that the dressing makes her stomach upset and that, before the kids, he would make french toast on Sundays because that’s what his grandmother did while he was growing up. She forgets that she can no longer hold her alcohol and gets drunk on two glasses of wine and makes a scene. He takes her home early and remembers why he works till six instead of five and lingers an extra few seconds at the stop sign at the front of their neighborhood. 

There’s the guy and the girl who are so whole-heartedly, madly in love that—oh I don’t want to talk about them. I turn my gaze

The old rich man looks at my crossed legs that peak out from the slit in my dress. I run into the drunk wife in the bathroom and tell her that I love her purse. She tells me where it’s form and—oh, I don’t give a shit. 

Even though I am half hidden behind an overwatered tropical fern and the wicker lights are too dim, they’ll all still see me. How can they not? A small girl like me with only a single place setting on my table? I must be the largest person on that terracotta tiled patio by the way they look at me. A giant slouched down to my pinprick of a table. The way their eyes flick between me and their friends, me and their loves, me and their black metal credit cards. 

Me. I hate that I think of myself like this. Me. These aren’t side characters in the story of my world. I am but a bystander on the sidewalk looking into the vibrant shop display behind the glass. They will see me and ask questions. Who is she? Dinner and dessert? She can’t eat all of that. Two, three drinks? Who is going to take her home? And forget.

The fat little girl who is out to dinner with her family thinks I’m cool. I keep catching her staring, tracing my motions as if my image was one of those Barbie fashion impression plates. The kind where you unwrap a crayon and use its side to imprint an outfit on a piece of paper. The kind of toy that is too ancient for this young girl.

The fat little girl picked up a yellow crayon from her complimentary pack of five after she noticed the yellow dress that hangs off my jagged frame. She snagged the cucumbers from her mother's salad and put them in her water after she saw me sipping my cucumber gin gimlet. As she left, she watched me pick at my dinner, set down my fork, and ask for a refill on my drink. A little stronger next time, please.

Where in her box of memories will she store me? Next to the magazines and the models and the hopeless stories of love? When she grabs the fat on her stomach and stands in the mirror, will she think of me? It won’t be hard to fit a small girl like me anywhere.

I try to stay out as late as I can, but there’s always that fear—that uncertainty that the deep night brings. In the hours when most of the city is asleep in navy blue and the only thing that’s awake is the neon lights and the people that swarm to them like moths. I can hear their flapping wings beat louder and louder with each sip of my drink, inviting me. I want to beat with them, too. Bat. Bat. Bat. Under the buzz of the lights and the dripping of overflowing glasses of drinks that I have lost the name of. In unison, I want to down one drink after the other until we’re one and the same and my heart is beating at that same...

BAT.

BAT.

BAT.

I want to find relationships there. The friendly, the romantic, the downright absurd. I want to forget our conversations until a random day a few weeks later when I think I see their unfamiliar faces in a crowd. I try to place it—where have I seen them before? And then remember that night and all the emotions—the good and the bad—that come with it. I quickly scurry away and avert my gaze as they catch my yellow dress and think about its familiarity. Where have I seen that dress before? That frame? Have I held it?

One more drink and I won’t be able to drive home, I’ll be at the mercy of the arms and cars of others. I have rarely found mercy there, I don’t think it can live in those conditions. Too much alcohol, not enough bread—or food in general—to soak it up and keep me on level ground.  

So I go home before I am unable to. Somehow, the certainty that greets me at the door is worse than the uncertainty that lives under those neons.

But if I did stay, leave myself to the whims and mystics of others, would he come and save me? The man I love who always saves everyone else. Always at the call of others, would he put on his heavy armor and come save me? Place Tylenol and water next to the bed and hold me while everything spins and I think about that fat girl and that old man and that wife who hates being a mother.

The troubles we ignore stay awake in bed and wait for us. We stumble home, intoxicated on a fearless night out without them, and dread their coldness that greets us, but won't ever leave. We have no other bed to climb into, so we sink in next to them and brace for their touch. Our troubles tell us false promises with empty words. They hold us and kiss us where we hate to be kissed. Let me go, please, I so very much enjoyed my night without you. 

Authors Note: I think I wrote this in like 2021? Maybe 2022? I would frequent the Tommy Bahama Restaurant at Legacy West in Plano, Texas often. I think about their "Cucumber Smash" gin gimlet all the time.

This piece is no where near finished, but still love it all the same.