Table 407. A bar on Liverpool Street. Three girls
stumbled in on a Saturday night. Their
last night together for the foreseeable and indefinite
and ridiculously uncertain future. Time is an
unavoidable foe, indomitable to those caught
in dire scarcity of it. Distance, a fucked-up construct
modern technology ought to have eliminated by now.
.
The teakwood table, its boastful shine,
the bar’s muted yellow lighting reflected. It was
something of a miracle when I found a scratch
in this object of fantasy—an overlooked blemish,
a carving that could have been the distant relative
of a lopsided heart. The funny thing about being
eighteen and hopeful is that we took it for a heart,
imagining the groups of friends, clashing of elbows,
and nonsensical chatter this table had witnessed before us.
.
Bubblebath. French Kiss. Bong Voyage.
They sounded like a send-off for an
exotic vacation more than the names of our cocktails.
How appropriate for a heartbreaking
goodbye to an era we were still desperately
clinging to. It is a beautiful thing to find your soul-
mates in your high school best friends.
That night, on Liverpool Street, something special
felt like it was coming to a jarring end.
The blissful tryst of destiny, the wonderfully weird
turn of events that brought me to these very
people, this very place.
.
Three years later, I went back to look for the
against-all-odds carved heart. It was still there.
Someone had outlined it with red ink. So much
had changed since the first time we were here.
But not the heart. Back to 407. Table for three.