Dinner at Half Past Seven

I walked across the parking lot car-weary, stepping to the side to let my dad pass me and not through me. Inside I corridored like the upstairs architecture told me to. Further inside, plants of an artificial green burst out from pots arranged like so, and I'd later realise the left wall was painted as if with fish scales, gave me feeling of being digested slowly while digesting slowly the food we were about to eat.

It was about the right time, when he followed right behind me and verticalled a finger in front of his lips to my sideways turned head, when after I went to the birthday boy and warmed him with a hug and the extra gift wrapped hours before, when he surprised the birthday boy because he had told him he wasn't going to come because he was feeling sick and I noticed the desks had corners and menus were in front of every chair and on the far wall friendships were sitting like so, deciding or waiting to decide what they would pick to digest. I complimented his her and she wasn't listening, her head wearing hair to the shoulders like a cape with the selective hearing superpower. My head turned towards some other corner of the room, then she said her hellooh and asked if I noticed the clinkety red and white leaves vined around her neck which I'd complimented her on.

Although almost everyone who came I was familiar with, I wanted to sit down with her, so we did; after waiting to see where the birthday boy would sit, so we would be proximally arranged near him. Other bodies weighed the seats down in front of me, beside me, at the other long table. I don't know what it is, but there's always clusters, rules that govern which bodies are seated where – must have to do with the sense of gravity, how bodies couple together and a phone comes out and those coupled bodies are stored in a removed memory bank away from just being there. Memories fleet. Among these bodies, there is a peculiar sense of porous silence that sludges over and through flesh, holding in words inside mouths and attaching particular concentrations of weight to foreheads so as to pull whole heads down in between sentences. There were two clusters of helium-filled balloons strung with cheap ribbon, one on each table. Conversations satellited around them, revolving several times through top and bot lane. I think for the first time in months I noticed how planetary I had become. I knew that asteroids and moon rock after a collision drifted through space, and I knew that I was being pulled by a different sense of gravity, but somehow I'd thought I'd not gone so far so as to have left the orbit.

Dinner came around half past eight, my linguini a too cheesy marsh of alien tentacles feasting on the scraps of dead poultry. A mise en abyme of digestion.

He sat a seat away from me but later swapped with his she so that he then sat next to me but at a distance of chairs probably explainable by his want to be closer to her than me. He pointed out a Swedish drink on the drinks menu he'd mentioned to me a month or two ago. We got three. Mine came first, then the message that the two they'd ordered the place had run out of, so they offered two other flavours. His tasted the best out of all three, hers the worst because the aftertaste reminded me of eating the little legs of white bacteria. As I was standing next to him at the bar while he was tapping in his eftpos pin, the boundaries of space seemed to polarise. My head flitted around after my suddenly claustrophobic gaze as if to catch and restrain it before it did something socially unacceptable. Later I'd accidentally hit a girl in the face, though not so much accidentally as not having considered the consequence of exerting force through a flick of a balloon. Suddenly I went from feeling like I was among the familiar company of friends to being the alien disguised as a human being.

I don't recall him talking about Jax or something that happened last game like the others moving around the helium maypoles; but sitting next to each other and him looking away a bracketed second before I thought he would. The continuum had stretched out long before he said he hadn't seen in me in ages and asked what I'd been up to. Me, reading mainly. He'd seen me walk and read The Forrests days before. Him, work and parties. The universe had expanded and the past few months our fibrous lives had unravelled away from each other and coming back like this, in this room, for this occasion, was like looking out from the edge of one ocean at the landmass that could be glimpsed just just past the miniscus of the horizon. Continents drift apart centimetres a year. I got the sense that we were far quicker. In between us lay an asterisked calm.

I felt something that later would manifest itself as the need to apologise. I was the one that left, that said I didn't want to text because I was too busy and felt too interrupted. I was the one that stopped going to Summoner's Rift. I left with more conversation between my teeth than cheesed monster. I hadn't realised our lands had drifted so far apart that the possibility of him spotting me standing alongside my beacon after maybe just one more day's navigating to my shore became the possibility of seeing an entire planet in the sky. Only at night, and then.

I walked off to be picked up by my brother around half past ten. Inchoate hazes migrated across the darker sky. I spotted a not quite fully thought out face up there looking towards me, but probably not seeing me in the empty parking lot.