Last One Plated: Foodless Among the Fed

I recently went out to eat with a group of people (not bragging) and was the last person to get my food. This moment of solitude I experienced resulted in an outlook on life not unlike that of Thoreau after his two years in the wilderness, or Chris McCandless before he ate those berries. 

A group dining experience is already a precarious endeavor. From slow service, to allergic reaction, to choking on a marinara coated meatball, the chance of irrevocably ruining your reputation is high. Speaking specifically to the meatball problem: choking to death is often considered “worst case scenario”. However, death is only secondary to a far more devastating outcome: delayed survival. There is a limited window of opportunity to choke and still garner some sympathy out of the whole ordeal, but if you over choke your welcome (as they say), get an ambulance called on you, are driven to a hospital, and are put under for the surgical removal of meatball chunk, you would have fared better socially had you just gone ahead and died.

So besides narrowly surviving a lodged piece of ground beef, the only thing worse would be your food not coming out with everybody else’s, which is what happened to me. I resist the title of martyr, however my experience inflicted a trauma I feel, looking across the table, nobody but myself could have endured. As I sat there plateless, I looked around myself to find the soft, the weak, and the fragile. I saw in each of them their unfettered frailty. Their innermost debilities and their ailing decrepitness. 

“To whom does God bestow his toughest battles but to His strongest soldiers?”, I thought as I stared down at what was once a tabletop—now a barren, desolate wasteland. While my so called “friends” licked their lips in the steam of turkey clubs and sweet potato fries like a cult of witches before a seance, I focused my glare downward, telling the others to, “go on without me” like a battered explorer abandoning his sherpa. I twisted the corners of my napkin. I rummaged around the little sugar packet holder. I clutched my knife and fork, white knuckling myself into a carpal tunnel syndrome. Like Mother Teresa and Joan of Arc, I suffered in silence, muttering quietly under my breath a prayer that everyone would get food poisoning and diarrhea everywhere. 

45 seconds later my food came. Critics may write in saying that is “hardly any time at all” and “not really worth a five hundred word blog post” and to that I say if 45 seconds is nothing then how come I had time to write down every person’s name in my notes app with descriptions such as “useless in time of need” and “backstabber”?  

Ultimately this experience gave me understanding I don’t expect others to comprehend. It is those who question who have never experienced. And it is to those I pray you never will.