For my first few months out here I ate almost every dinner standing up.
Not on purpose. If you had asked me I would have said I was busy. The client was in another time zone. It was faster to grab something and take it back to the room. All of that was true and none of it was the reason.
The reason was that I could not sit down in a restaurant by myself.
I got good at not doing it, and that is the part I did not notice at the time. It was never one hard night. It was a system I built without ever deciding to build it.
Street carts, because you stand at a cart and nobody thinks anything of it. The metal counter at the noodle shop, facing the wall, in and out in 9 minutes. The 7-Eleven at 10pm, which is its own category of dinner and I will not defend it. And a lot of nights on the edge of a bed in a rented room with a plastic box on my knees and the laptop open next to me so it counted as work.
That room had a fan that clicked once every turn. I ate to that sound for months.
It was not being alone that bothered me. I was alone all day and it never once bothered me.
It was being seen alone.
Somewhere in that first year I worked out the exact moment I was afraid of. You walk in, someone holds up a hand and asks how many, and you say one. Then they say it back to you. One. And a person comes over and takes the second set of chopsticks off the table, and the second glass, and now there is a clean empty space across from you with nothing on it, and you sit in front of that for the length of a meal.
I would rather stand at a cart in the rain. So I did.
What broke it was weather.
I was in a small town in the south. The name does not matter. I had left it too late and a storm came in the way they do down there, straight down, no warning, the street turning brown and moving in under 10 minutes.
Everything was shut. There was one place still open at the end of a row of shophouses, shutter halfway down, light coming out underneath it.
Six plastic stools. Three tables. No menu, because there was one dish.
My phone was at 4 percent and it died while I was shaking the water off my arms. So I sat down with nothing in my hands.
The food arrived without me ordering it, because there was nothing to order. Rice. Pork that had been in the pan long enough to go dark at the edges. A fried egg with the white gone lacy and crisp where the oil caught it. A small bowl of clear broth with something green floating in it. A saucer of chopped chillies in fish sauce that I did not ask for and finished anyway.
I ate slowly, because there was no reason to hurry and nothing to hurry toward.
The fan was tied to a pillar with wire. There was a television up in the corner playing a soap opera with the sound off and nobody watching it. The family who ran the place were eating their own dinner at the back table, all of them at once, loud, one of the kids on a phone. On the wall was a calendar from a tire company, 2 years out of date.
I sat there about 40 minutes. Nothing happened. That is the entire event.
When I paid, the woman who had cooked it said something to me from the doorway. I caught about half of it. My language was worse then. I have turned it over since and I still do not know whether she was telling me to come back or telling me to go carefully on the road. Both would have been a normal thing to say.
What I picked up that night was not confidence. Confidence has nothing to do with it, and anyone who tells you to walk in like you own the place has never been the only foreigner in a room.
It is smaller and more boring than that. It is knowing what to do with your hands and your eyes for 40 minutes with no screen to look at. And it is finding out that nobody in the room is doing the sum you think they are doing.
The other people are looking at their own food. The woman with the ladle has fed maybe 400 people this week and you are not the interesting one. Nobody has decided anything about you. The story where the whole room notices you came in alone is running in one place only, and it is not the room.
It took me another month after that night to sit down without having to talk myself into it. Two months, total, for a chair.
I want to be honest about what this fixed and what it did not.
It did not fix the loneliness. That is still there, in the same place it has always been, mostly on Sunday afternoons, and no table for one has ever done a thing about it.
What it fixed was smaller. It stopped the loneliness from deciding where I was allowed to go.
For months, every restaurant I could not walk into alone was simply a restaurant I did not walk into. Write that list out and it is long, and it is most of the good ones. The places with no takeaway. The ones with plastic tablecloths and the family eating at the back. Grilled fish by the river at a place with four tables and a dog asleep under one of them.
A whole country, and I had access to the parts of it I could eat standing up.
I still have the old habit in me. I order 2 dishes when 1 would do, so the table looks like it is expecting somebody. I catch myself doing it and I do it anyway.
But there is a noodle place 2 streets from where I live now, and I go on Tuesdays. Chair on my side. Nothing on the other side.
Last Tuesday it rained again. I sat and waited it out with a bowl in front of me and nothing to look at and nowhere I had to be.
Andrew - No Refunds •••