The person who dines out alone is a particular kind of person. Something in my subconscious awards this person extra merit when I witness them sit down by themselves to eat. Sometimes they will sit at the bar, their body still, their mouth moving, while I go about my things. On my side of the bar, I will grate cheese, slice meat, jar pickles, pour drinks, while at the same time throwing out questions and waiting for answers. I throw gently and after time, after alcohol, more inquisitively.
I like to buy scratchies on Sundays from the newsagent, $2 ones, even though I never win. I think of the people I pass by on the street, sitting opposite me at the bar or adjacent from me at the library in the same vein as when I take my fifty-cent coin and remove the surface of the $2 card. Everyone presents a dark surface but with the right utensils, it is not hard to remove parts, peek inside, draw a picture, decipher meaning and if you’re lucky truth.
I have never comprehended the stigma attached to those who choose to go about one’s day alone. I relish an unaccompanied morning coffee, movie, walk, museum, glass of wine or sunbake in the park. Every day when I misunderstand someone, stutter, fail to grasp the meaning of a joke or comprehend another’s actions, I am reminded of the very solitude of my existence.
Today at the bar I was standing with my back to the customer side, it was that soleless few hours of day between lunchtime and the end of the 9-5 working day, a time I have come to welcome warmly in the hospitality industry, for it is a time for monotonous tasks, the radio and leaning my hip again the stainless steel bench. I was pre-occupied with pulling the chicken’s flesh from its carcass when he walked in. I was having a problem with the de-fleshing of the chicken because my boss requested the torn chunks of chicken remain large and succulent but also that there be absolutely NO bones.
I am still unsure as to how I can guarantee both of these things.
He didn’t seem to be phased by the radio, too attuned to the cadence of his inner thought. Before today I hadn’t seen him in a while, two weeks come to think of it. Today he came in, atypically alone. It was when I turned to address him properly and noticed the extra creases on his face and the red swell of the skin surrounding his eyes that I realised he is not just alone today but alone, alone. His voice came back to me broken as if he hadn’t used it for some time.
Just before he walked in I had been wondering to myself, if I were to find the wishbone in this chicken and continue to find the wishbone every day for the remainder of my time here, would all my desires come true if I were to ceremoniously snap them at once.
These are the kinds of thoughts that arise in the three-four o’clock hours, thoughts with their own will, that grow like grass, nourished by boredom. I considered saying this aloud, I even considered offering him a wishbone of his own, but something, a feeling, held it at a thought. I closed the distance between us so that if you were to remove the slim slab of bar we would be standing very close; too close for a customer and a sandwich maker. I filled a water glass in front of him and when a little bit spilled to wet his finger I made sure to keep looking down. Alone, serving a male customer, I become acutely aware of my female body.
From what I could gather he had just been at the supermarket; in his hands were a packet of crispy M&M’s, a carton of coconut water and some bandaids. I mapped his exposed bits of body for abrasions but upon finding none I wondered instead if they could be for his heart. Without her, I was made aware of his poor posture and stumpy thumb hitherto concealed by her elegant, brown hands. He ordered a pastrami sandwich and as I made it I went about the probing of his now softer body with the sound of my questions. When he disregarded his pickle and chewed with his eyes closed I was confronted by our undeniable separateness from one another; these actions, all actions, are complex expressions of our untrodden internal landscapes. I wanted to say to him that loneliness is a special kind of place and if he decides not to drown in it he will get straight to the root of what he wants and needs. I wanted to say to him that intimacy requires a rounded sense of selfhood to succeed.
Another man, the second-loneliest one I’ve ever met, used to come and sit at the bar every day at around four pm. He would usually order a cider, tally three, and then move on to a Nikka single malt coffee whiskey, neat. He would arrive already smelling of alcohol and when he raised his glass to his mouth or bank card towards the machine I was always taken aback by the shake of his hand, a clear sign to me of how alcohol both relieved and burdened him. He lived next door to the shop and we never saw him without a flat cap basketball hat on. I didn’t probe him much because I knew more than he thought I did about him due to his recent notoriety in Melbourne’s most-read newspaper. The articles about his white-collar criminality coincided with when he started coming in regularly. He asked me the same questions week after week to which I regurgitated the same answers. When Paul Kelly’s How to Make the Gravy plays, as it frequently does, in my family home I remember to a night closing up by myself. The chairs were up, I was sweeping and trying to decide if I would meet friends in the city or take myself home. A delivery driver knocked on my door and said his name. I pointed next door and as he walked away I saw the paper bagged bottle of alcohol he was delivering. I still wonder how we get there. What has happened along the way to convolute his judgments so. He spent the Christmas that has just been in prison, where a new kind of loneliness is inhabited, confined to himself, I imagine him sweating disillusion.
The loneliest person I have ever met is also a cider drinker. I struggle to attend a form of address for him as he is not a man, nor is he a boy. When he would sit opposite me at the bar and fluently fabricate narrative I remember thinking he could be the most indiscernible person I have ever met. I remember thinking he is sowing a bed for himself, so intricate and delicate he might die in it and young; he seemed to me, the kind of person who would die young. Once, he told me he was voted young chef of the year but rejected the whole thing because he didn’t want the attention. He told me he was forced to be awake for his own circumcision at age of thirteen and that his parents left him and his siblings each a one in ten rare vintage car, when I asked him if he used his today he said his mum wrote his off and he doesn’t have any photos. Upon hearing my interest in writing he told me he wrote an article for the Age newspaper but when I asked to read it said it was a couple years ago and only in print, not online. After a shift where he had sat at the bar opposite me, I will feel extra exhausted. I would try to recite it to T when I got home but it all sounded so ridiculous, as though I was exaggerating for effect. He lived in a state of lack, even the way his shoulders angled into the ground the way they did. Much like the alcoholic from next door he had a permanent air about him as if his persistent solitude had staled his clothes. Olivia Liang describes it as a prophylactic that grows around a person like mold or fur, preventing contact no matter how much the person may desire it. Every week for a year he told me he was going to Europe to work in several Michelin star restaurants and when it continued to be delayed for some reason or another I sensed it was another lie. Though I have not seen him for a very long time and often think of him when I pour a cider, genuinely hopeful that he is in Europe somewhere.
Yellow Days 