Places
Tonight I went to eat at restaurant where I have only ever had one dish. It is the only dish I ever will order. Thai Cashew Chicken. Gai Prad Pry Haeng. Or something like that. I eat it with 2 bowls of rice. More carbs than I need, but it is How I Eat The Thai Cashew Chicken. I relished every mouthful. And I remembered.
I remembered I only used to go here with one other person. I remember it was the one place there was no discussion about. It was the place. Not romantic, not lovely, not fast. Just a place that wove itself into our relationship somehow, and made a home there. I didn't avoid this restaurant. I did not have feeling one way or another about going back. It is like... a joint friend that stays with you regardless
I am not sure how it happened. I am not sure how other places like that happened for me. They just fit, and merge, and there's an end to it. Some are different restaurants. Others, a theater where I and a different person never cared what was playing, the side of a parking structure where a friend told a great joke, and a small hill a thousand miles away where two of us would always go to work out Great Questions as we that looked down on a bustling neighborhood.
Some places are just mine. The river is like that. I can share it, talk about it, see others there, but it is still mine. Especially mine. The whirl around at the playground in my hometown is like that. I sit on it and kick off and we nod at each other, but nothing needs to be said. It and I pick up our circle again right where we left off, right where it waits with the circles of a thousand other kids. And there is a place, enclosed by tall stone walls and cut glass, with no roof but the sky and greyed, wooden furniture for furnishings. That is always mine, wrapping me in cool silent friendship, even when another enters to take their own communion there.
I wonder, after visiting these places, if I can ever make my own home a friend. I am not sure. I never have. All my places that are friends are away from home, and have been, always. I don't know what that means, or if it means anything. Maybe I will know when a home I make finally becomes my friend.
24 October 2003