afternoon delight

This is another repost from my old blog, originally written in 2005.

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A mid-afternoon lunch out alone in a busy fast food chain doesn’t really make you a complete anti-social. Well, for one thing, it was your choice to enjoy a hearty meal without any company to speak of, but your pen (your precious retractable courtesy of tito), wallet (sadly clinking with more coins), a pack of facial tissue (for the impeccable timing of a runny nose) and a peevish tummy (on self-imposed starvation after trying to finish your morning load at work…you simply refused to go by mechanical time…). You thought about calling a friend to join you for lunch. Then again you thought, you’d manage without bothering your friend who might be catching some sleep from her night duty. And you remembered, you were having lunch late…way past the noon break, so you get the idea.

After 22 summers of being with your own self, you felt more secure about having lunch alone.

You’ve done it in your freshman year, although back then, you were entirely unwilling to be caught alone drenched in rain in a food chain across the university when a stream of upperclassmen happen to be at the same place passing time waiting for the heavy downpour to stop (hopefully before cars seemed icebergs afloat that infamous street). Perhaps that experience triggered something good, boosting your self-awareness that you can actually take care of yourself. Although you had to point out that it was the first few weeks of class and you’re not a total hermit for spending that afternoon alone.

Warp zone sent you back to that Friday lunch you were having (imagine Mario3 and his magic flute) and started to enjoy (?) your moment. Clutching your tray, you secured a spot and purposely parked your end near the glass panels so you could have a better view of passers-by. You sure have that penchant for observing people and surroundings, something you can’t really do as often and when you’ve got company.

The air-conditioning left you colder than what you would have preferred, having that low threshold for chilly temps. It didn’t help that you were having frosty with your cheeseburger and a large root beer loaded with ice: it was more like ice with root beer (they always do that, you feel like you’re shortchanged, thing is, you allow things like that to happen…too bad eh). Still, you didn’t let it ruin your solitary rendezvous, even if you noticed a 1.27% local tax charged on your bill and wondered where do people’s taxes go—and you answered your own question: everywhere but where taxes should be.

It would have helped if the featured artist at the makeshift concert-stage that afternoon was the band you’re dying to see perform, but no, as fate would have it, she was the last person you would have wanted to see perform. Worse, you felt indifference toward her and don’t you think that indifference is harsher than downbeat dislike? How often does life treat you as a funny story? You know, getting what you don’t really need and running after what you think is what you need when in fact you only want it… You sometimes sense a prowling enemy when life seems to play jokes on you that way.

Even then, you tried to put everything your senses grasped together. The crew over the counter attending to four Koreans, showing off the legendary Filipino hospitality…how the cost of your measly lunch would have fed three kids with a pretty decent meal, those kids who are actually more famished than your stomach forced to starve at will …that as you try to take pleasure in the economy of loneliness, you realize, you can only be grateful for so much.

Your attention is drawn to the sauntering people passing along the other side of your glass pane…young ones with their young ones, women with their men, friends with friends or pseudofriends: (how do they even know?)…that guy with his weighed down eyes mulling over a pending retrenchment… You discovered that you were not simply watching people, beyond each person you came across—no matter how hard you endured an annoying PDA or how silly one man wore his few remaining hairs over his spotless head, or how much rowdier the youngsters can get when they should have been attending class (as if you never did the same)—there were stories and lives who are awaiting to be revealed, perhaps not to you but to the people they choose to reveal themselves to. It suddenly struck you, people do seem to have that longing to be found—if you’ve seen Lost in Translation, you’d probably get the drift.

As you took the last bite of what you had yourself convinced was a lip-smacking-treat, you look forward to another one of these lunch outs alone, although you could always spare some company, it sure is healthier if you indulge in things like these in moderation. After all, you don’t really need to prove you’re a social creature anyway.

Then you remember that pesticide commercial…sky, rockets in flight…