do you want to split the curry or fried rice?

We were at a Thai restaurant I didn’t want to go to when I read him the paragraph. The sweat on the back of my thighs stuck to the red plastic lining of the booth seat that reminded me of the Mexican restaurants I would go to with my parents when I was little. I used to eat way too much too fast and want to take a nap, stretching out, allowing the sticky red plastic lining to touch every part of me, not just my thighs.

The tables at the Thai place had the menus tucked under the glass, protected from the wear and tear of oily fingers and indecisive eyes. It made a lot of sense to me, but it also made me think about what a lot of work it would be to edit the menus, lifting every table’s glass, printing the new sheets, putting them back down under the glass top until the next time there was something to change. I guess people are kinda like that too, going through an awful lot of trouble to change the way they are, resting briefly, until it’s time to change again.

The paragraph I read him was from a book I got in the little free library a couple blocks from our house, in the grass where my dog likes to poop. She pulls to her favorite spot and while she does something that reminds me that we’re all just animals, I look at the books that have been recently added to the wooden box that someone built with their hands. Sometimes there are stupid books that aren’t even really books — pamphlets and magazines that someone should have recycled or thrown in the trash but couldn’t bring themselves to do so, instead slipping them into the free library, making it someone else’s problem. An escape from guilt disguised as doing good. I get it, throwing away paper and ink that should have stayed trees really gets me too. But sometimes there are books the opposite of stupid, life changing words you need to read, waiting in a box in a book, hoping you’ll find them. Paper and ink that the trees they were cut from could be proud of.

I finished the paragraph from the book from the little free library where Stella likes to poop and I looked up at him, hoping he would feel the electricity that was running through my thighs stuck to the red plastic booth seat.

I told him the words on the paper me feel alive inside, like I am seen by a stranger. The words I see printed on paper somehow looking back up to see me, too.

“You could do that you know” he says, believing in a part of me I haven’t been very nice to lately. “You could write like that. You do write like that.”

I change the subject and turn my attention back to the menus stuck under glass tables again, trying not show him that I feel like I’ve never known a love this pure and deep. I’ve never had someone see the parts of me I can’t see in myself at a Thai restaurant i didn’t even want to go to.

“Do you want to split the curry or the fried rice?” I say, wondering if pushing my love under the surface is kind of like putting a menu under a glass table so you don’t have to deal with the inevitable rips and cracks that come after letting someone hold you.

He picked the fried rice. Today I met a stranger and we talked about reflection. We talked about looking in mirrors and writing in journals and gracing one another with the kind of empathy that allows you to see yourself in someone else’s pain. She said whenever she realizes she’s stopped reflecting intentionally, a quick look around her life will show her why she stopped. Sometimes she’s unhappy with her recent behavior. Sometime’s she’s hiding from herself, keeping her heart under a glass table where it can’t get ripped or torn or soiled.

Talking to her made me think about the paragraph in the book I picked up in the little free library a couple blocks from our house, in the grass where my dog likes to poop. It made me wonder if maybe the words I read to my lover in a Thai restaurant I didn’t want to go to was actually just someone sweeping out the cobwebs and dust from the parts of themself that they hadn’t been very nice to lately, parts of a human that they were hiding from themselves, until they weren’t. That maybe her words were just grace in the form of ink and trees, waiting in a box in a book, hoping I’d find them and feel seen in the same way I see them.