chinese restaurants and lost weekends
I’ve been in a pretty foul mood today, after an Outlook calendar reminder popped up to reveal the once-lofty weekend plans as a big, expensive waste. Not that I didn’t already know, but I really didn’t need the tickler to prove how far and how quickly things have fallen. There will be nothing great or magical about it — meant to mark an anniversary of sorts and as I later discovered a birthday, too — it turns out, nothing to celebrate for the former, and the later is not my responsibility to care about anymore.
My plan was simply perfect. A show, the psychic and the psychotic thing, which is supposed to be cool and riveting, followed by a late lunch at Paradou, selected because their hundreds of cheeses are legendary. While it is French they allowed me to special order bottles of a Spanish wine from the vineyard that shares his last name. And of course, there is that guitar, something I have really come to hate — for taking up space, for being the pair of Jimmy Choos in my Converse world, for the loving effort it consumed, and mostly that it is so symbolic of my naive hopefulness.
I ate the tickets and the wine (well drank, the first bottle as I write this, in fact) and that fucking guitar is finding it’s way to the boulevard tomorrow. Or in Brooklyn’s case, the sidewalk by the street. I can’t look at it without feeling like an utter failure and an idiotic, gullible human being.
A long time ago, I dated someone whose infidelity ended our relationship. Back then, I was less hurt by the cheating than I was that he had taken her to a certain Chinese restaurant. It was a favorite of mine, and somehow that act symbolized more than dining — to me, it was a flagrant flip off — he could have gone anywhere, but it was a place that meant something to me. This weekend is reminiscent that way. In my heart, it is not the ending I find most distressing; it is the prevailing sense that I never bore significance enough to be given more than scraps from the table, even then with well-measured reluctance; the deep emotion being singular and only mine, and the unsolicited proclamations as empty as the day will be.
