Auguri, my dear. You have arrived at an honored seat at the table that some never get to secure. The fact that this seat of solitude awaits you is evidence that your gods want you to stay for the whole meal.
Gone is the clink of cutlery moving together. The reaching over and under of limbs, tasting in tandem. Maybe the memory of that clamour feels like happiness and this separation feels like sorrow. If so, start with that hunger and stay with it. Roam your neighborhood at dinnertime. Stare into windows at other’s shared feasts. Look upon those laughing faces who you fear will never let you back in and let your longing for them linger.
Then, when you’ve worked up enough of an appetite, invite yourself back inside the only inside you’ve got. Whether it’s a lone throne all the way at the end of an empty dining table, or a cracked-leather booth at the back of a crowded restaurant, ensconce yourself somewhere that’s fit for confiding in and conspiring with yourself. Relish the too-strong flavors that you would never let loose on your tongue if you were talking close with another. Speak to yourself in extra aglio and call for another round of whatever the hell you want to wash it all down. Offer yourself the opposite of what feels like exile. Let the candles drip. Let the cups run over. Become decadent in the face of what you perceive has been denied you.
And know, too, that you will never really eat alone. Each supper is a seance with your many selves. And it is a sharing of spoons with all the spirits who always surround you—and who know better than to ever let the bread of life grow stale, even for a second. Make yourself a meal that springs straight from a memory. Maybe it’s a memory from a moment when you were surrounded by many. But it’s also a memory from a moment when there was a different you among those many. One who, no matter the linked arms and shared tastes, was a self that is ultimately unknowable in its entirety to anyone but you. Toast to that one and then turn to this one, still warm and awaiting the next course.
Each meal you serve your solitary self during this time is an offering and a promise to never leave your own side. Through the times when the wedding pastries are puffed with partnership. Through the tastes that are lemony astringent with loss. To always ask this being what they crave, to procure those provisions in their utmost particularity, and to prepare them to taste. If you don’t learn to sit with this self, you will show up scratching at other’s kitchen windows, forever expecting to be served the things they will never be able to give you. You will become a fathomless pit, hands reaching, heart empty, never quite full.
Don’t mistake the memory of happiness for the promise of joy. Happiness is a sweet story. But it is a smaller one. Concerned with the having or not having, who’s here or who’s gone. While joy, my dear, that is the real dessert. The one that lingers past the digestif and will never leave you, all your days. It is the fullness of being able to sit with and beside the only self you’ve got. If you don’t understand how to serve this self, you will never know peace.
Do not forgo any flavor in this feast that has been prepared for you. Because through feast and fallow, through friends and lovers and all of it, inevitably, leaving … all the way to the end, it is you who will have the last bite.
Un abbraccio forte,
Otea
