I’m on a boat in the middle of a vast sea that is ever so still. There’s nothing to anchor me down, but I’m not moving. The still waters work well in my favour for I’m taking stock of things, I’m fishing. However, it is not Trout or Mackerel that I am hoping to catch but something much more rare. I had heard that this was a good spot to catch pieces of real existence.
I was an abstract thought that needed validation, and this came in the form of a real existence, pieces of which I have recently started collecting in the hope that one day, I’d become anchored and thus connected with the world. I was in luck. I pulled and hoisted my catch onto the boat: ‘an arrangement to have lunch with a friend.’ I’d be sure to place this in the highest esteem amongst all the others in my rather small collection.
The following day brought about this particular engagement, in an Italian café situated inside a shopping centre. Oh imagine the elation one felt when happening upon such a peculiar social space as this, for there was the social space occupied by my friend and I, within that of the café, within the shopping centre - it was a meta-space. There was a display of shoes just outside the entrance of a café, a coral reef of Stilletos and pumps that was free to be perused by passing shoppers. As I watched the shoppers through the large windows I couldn’t help but feel like I was in an aquarium.
Drawing this similarity was undoubtedly distracting me from the arduous task at hand: deciding what to order. I simply could not decide, so I appealed to my friend to decide for me. Only too familiar with my abysmal decision making skills, she readily recommended a pasta dish which seemed pleasant enough for someone with an uncertain disposition such as I.
I happily settled on this recommendation which made ordering a less arduous task than it usually was. My mind now at rest, I was free to enjoy the event and converse with my friend on a number of topics. However, the content mood I was in soon disintegrated on arrival of the food.
The pasta seemed to have been drizzled generously with green pesto. My friend, noticing my hesitation, enquired, ‘what’s the matter?’ I told her that the dish had pesto in it, to which she, adorned with a puzzled expression, began to recall previous meals at which I had eaten pesto without any complaint. ’That was before it happened..’ I said.
‘Before what happened?’ she asked with a weary look on her face.
‘Before pesto made me dislike myself.’
As soon as these words escaped my mouth I could see the already puzzled expression upon my friend’s face begin to change into one of complete bewilderment. I inferred that a verbal ’hit and run’ was out of the question, I would have to explain my last statement.
‘As I was dining one evening, I received a letter that caused me a great amount of vexation. I shan’t go into the particulars of the letter itself, the point is that it drove me to a mood that was quite rotten indeed. I sat there staring angrily into a bowl of pasta with tuna and pesto. It was a simple dish, a neutral object, and it was this neutrality which made it easy for me to transfer my annoyance about the letter to the dish itself.'
'I continued to eat, and as I was doing this, I realised that I had opened the gate, and now everything that I disliked and loathed was pouring into the bowl.'
‘It must have overflowed with all that hatred,’ she said with a complacent smile. Returning the smile, I continued, ‘well you’d think so, all my hatred and loathing combined with the pesto, becoming part of it. The pesto now embodied everything that I disliked.
‘That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t explain how the pesto made you dislike yourself,’ she said. Perhaps I was getting carried away with my account, forgetting about the ridiculous statement I was meant to be explaining. ‘Well, I continued to eat my dinner, consuming my hatred. All the things I disliked were now inside me, this brought on a certain kind of nausea, a nausea laced with self-refection.
This self-reflective nausea led me to question how reasonable I actually was in disliking and hating the things I did. Did Pantomimes really deserve my hatred? Was I unreasonable for loathing the term, ‘a bottle of bubbly?’ With a queasy stomach I continued to descend the staircase of self-awareness, thinking myself to be more and more disagreeable with each step. The idea of finding out what lay at the bottom of this staircase (if I were to ever reach it) was not so appealing to me, so I stopped eating. The nausea subsided within ten minutes, I don’t think there was any long-term damage.’
My friend smiled, she seemed satisfied with my ridiculous explanation for a ridiculous statement, but I dare not flatter myself. ‘So how are you going to cope with this?’ she asked, pointing at my plate.
‘I guess it’s too late to send it back…’I said with an air of resignation. It would truly be a hassle to send the food back and order something else, for these acts were bound in more explanations and indecisions. Social exertions such as these were really too much to bare at times.
I came to realise that even a small piece of real existence such as this was fraught with difficulties, difficulties that arose from interacting and even banal acts such as eating. It seemed that acquiring the pieces was only half the battle. I sat there staring into the sea, watching uninterested shoppers float past the coral reef of footwear, chewing a forkful of pasta while unwanted high heels glistened.
