A Table For One

Seeing someone eat dinner alone is sad.

I've been witness to sadder things in my life -- loved ones laid into the ground, buried; Requiem for a Dream; ex-girlfriends holding hands that aren't mine. And there are other things I haven't necessarily seen firsthand that I can confidently wager are also much sadder -- citizen casualties of war; slaughterhouses and meat packing plants; the Rwandan genocide. But I don't think that makes a table-for-one any less depressing.

And make no mistake, it's definitely a shallow kind of sad. It's the kind of sad that's brought on by reading too many books, growing up in the suburbs, daydreaming too often, studying too much poetry, being too observant, thinking too much. It's something that bothers the kind of person who spends too much time in their own head. There are no tangible consequences, no catastrophic fallout, from a person sitting down to a meal by themselves. But for the oversensitive among us, you might as well tell us our that our childhood family dog was hit by a cement truck.

I just saw this today at Applebee's (a very quick aside, I hate Applebee's. It's food's lowest common denominator. I ordered the overcooked steak; it sucked. And it isn't like it's the only chain restaurant that serves painfully-generic Middle American dishes and sticks stupid, random junk on the wall...it's just the one that does it the worst). At the table next to me, a man -- older, slightly overweight, a tucked-in button-down shirt and slacks, suspenders, pocket protector with pens -- was seated by his lonesome. This immediately made me feel bad. I started to lose my appetite. Many questions raced through my mind: who will he speak to? Who will he share his food with? Who will protect his plate from being cleared if he goes to the bathroom? And how will he possibly explain himself to co-workers who see him on their way out and ask him why he doesn't have any company?

As I always do in these situations, I eavesdropped on his order (he got the bacon cheeseburgers with fries), took note of the expression on his face when his food arrived, and discreetly watched him out of the corner of my eye as he ate. I always want to see if they order something good, if they look genuinely excited when their plate is placed in front of them, and most importantly, if they appear to thoroughly enjoy their meal. This is like consolation for me; if they're having a good time, I theoretically shouldn't feel so bad. But it rarely ever comforts me.

Obviously people eat alone. If not, they'd starve. Restaurants have single seating at the bar, have those individual swivel chairs at the counter (like at Denny's, for example). So there's an expectation that eventually someone, somewhere, will sit down to lunch or dinner without companionship. That contingency was clearly accounted for, built right into the blueprint of the building. But that doesn't make me any more predisposed to go along with it. I won't do it. I'd rather make dinner plans with someone I don't much care for, sparing myself the shame and humiliation. I'd rather order the food to-go, take it home and eat where the couch or TV or microwave isn't likely to judge me. And if it absolutely came down to it, I'd rather go to bed hungry, promising to treat myself to an extra-big bowl of cereal in the morning for breakfast.

When you're seated by yourself and look out across the table, the closest thing to human contact that you'll see in front of you is the back of the person sitting at the next table over -- there's just something that seems so hollow about that. And I'd like to distinguish that there is a difference between being seated alone by a hostess at a sit-down restaurant and simply choosing to quickly eat a meal on your own, like sitting down on a park bench with a brown-bagged lunch or stopping by the cafeteria real fast inbetween classes. Somehow, the latter is just a lot less pathetic.

And all of this is ironic because I do plenty of things on my own. Playing basketball, sitting and reading at the library, taking a walk -- I do this stuff by myself all the time. I'm extremely self-sufficient, very independent. I would go as far as saying I love solitude. I'm my own favorite person, so I don't otherwise have any objection with spending as much time with myself as I can. But it just so happens, for one reason or another, eating is one of the very few activities (one of the others being watching movies at the theater) that I'd rather do with a friend.