Chinda

They say, "Everything always changes." Until you step inside a restaurant that you haven't been to in twenty two years, the time when the semblance of a family held itself together before what would be a final holy eruption. And my teen-aged everything comes flooding into the space, drowning the old green carpeting and creeping up and over the wainscoting that kept these walls intact all this time. Nothing has changed, I sit drinking the same Thai iced coffee that I ordered in 1993 and all those years before. It tastes the same, except for that missing familiar after-taste of wanting something that isn't in my reach, life as a verb. This coffee has no after-anything, just the taste of now. I should have listened to this restaurant back then, when it was trying to tell me everything is going to be ok. And that I'll make it out better than alive.