May 06 2008

Text By Jamelah

This is a place where first dates happen. Where your feet shuffle nervously underneath the table -- did I kick you or was that the table leg? -- and great amounts of concentration are focused on whether your jokes are funny at all and if your hair is doing something odd now that you can't see it -- shouldn't have gotten that haircut today -- and please, please don't let there be anything stuck in your teeth.

It's a place where last dates happen, where you try to make a joke and are met with nothing but a cold stare in response, where all the food -- the food you can’t taste -- sticks to the roof of your mouth even though you don’t want to ask for more water and you don’t know why you said you’d show up in the first place.

It’s a place where friends go to talk, for lunch, for dinner, before or after a movie, before or after a first date or a last date, a place for you to laugh, to gush, to commiserate.

It’s just a place. A place like so many others, and it could be anywhere, it could be any place, but it’s not, it’s this one. And it has an empty chair, waiting.