Just the Thing
It might come to pass that you are sitting in the Nordstrom Café in Bellevue Square on a Friday afternoon at 3 pm, eating a Green Goddess salad and reading a novel. You may be there because you just got off a plane but need to buy something before you attend a funeral the next day. It may also come to pass that you can’t focus on your book. At first you wonder if it’s because you feel awkward sitting by yourself in a restaurant, but then you realize that, no, that’s probably not the case because you’ve engaged in some iteration of this ever since grad school, but you had more props — notebooks, textbooks, highlighters. Then again, that probably looked more purposeful and this looks like a random woman sitting by herself at a non-traditional meal hour fumbling with both an overflowing salad and a paperback.
The table to your left houses two moms with seemingly late school pickup times. The table behind them two incredibly chic women in their 70s on a (perhaps weekly?) shop-and-lunch date. They talk and talk and talk. (You miiiight be the kind of person who is happy to eavesdrop on school chitchat as well as grandparent brags.)
Or maybe it’s more precise to say that life is funny and fickle and sometimes really unfair and you wonder how it is possible that you are back here — in a mall that kind of feels familiar but mostly not because the Orange Julius has transformed into a Beecher’s Handmade Cheese outpost — to get that needed item (it was a belt) before saying goodbye to a childhood friend, someone who has always been in your orbit even if time, distance, and everything else has made it so that in some ways, you don’t know each other at all.
You read and reread and reread and reread the same two paragraphs. No progress is made. What is even going on in this book? You will yourself to not zone out on your phone. The phone stays in your bag. Because it comes to pass that sometimes we need something concrete to ground us, and the jumble of words on yellowed paper sandwiched between two slightly bent and slightly heavier pieces of paper — the second of which sports a library bar code — is just the thing.
originally published on instagram