my sandwich needs a raincheck
and so does my existence
lunch has become the meeting i cancel with myself. i remember the freeze dried mangos and her tiny shoes, to wash her favorite straw, and the work task that somehow developed three more work tasks while i was looking directly at it. i remember everyone’s water except mine.
by 3:00 in the afternoon, my body has usually sent several increasingly hostile reminders… and i have responded the way i respond to every email marked urgent: stared at it, felt vaguely accused, and decided i would “circle back.”
being responsible for a two-year-old is catering an extremely intimate restaurant where the customer changes her dietary philosophy every eleven minutes.
the strawberry she requested is suddenly offensive.
the cracker broken in half has suffered an irreversible character flaw…
anything on my plate, however, carries the glamour of stolen property. i stand at the counter eating the edge of something while she studies me with the quiet confidence of a person who has never once wondered whether she deserves lunch.
creative work makes this worse. i keep waiting for the clean stopping point, as though creativity has ever politely closed its own tab and told me to go make a sandwich. there is always one more sentence, one more image, one more idea that might vanish if i leave it unattended for seven minutes. so i protect the work from interruption and offer my body up as collateral.
oh, and to raise the stakes…
the internet believes this problem can be solved with matching glass containers. somewhere, a woman in linen is slicing cucumbers on a wooden board while sunlight rests supportively on her forearm. her refrigerator contains things labeled monday. mine contains ingredients with excellent intentions. self-care online has become so visually organized that real care can feel like a personal branding failure.
nobody films the part where you eat a piece of bread over the sink while opening a work email with your elbow. and there is no affiliate link.
what unsettles me is how fluent i have become in my own disappearance. i can spend all day wanting someone to notice me while repeatedly walking past myself. i want care to arrive without an interview. i want someone to place a plate in front of me without asking what i want, where the bread is, whether i’m really hungry, or if i can just tell them exactly how to take care of me. maybe that sounds embarrassingly specific. whelp… hunger tends to make a woman honest.
i wonder how many of my late-afternoon existential crises are a danger warning. how many times have i considered changing my career, leaving society, or driving alone until the road develops emotional intelligence… when all i needed was… twelve quiet minutes and something with protein?
still, there is something beneath the sandwich. there is the question of how long i can call myself forgotten while continuing to reschedule my own existence. maybe the version of me i keep waiting for everyone else to find has been sitting at the kitchen table, watching me rush past her with my hands full.
the thought beneath it:
forgetting lunch paints a rather large portrait of the uncomfortable recognition that… i have also become one of the people who keeps overlooking me. i hope to remember lunch today.
with love from the stillroom,
cibelle
i write to music. enjoy a sip while you wander through…