Wooden Booths

“This is a grubby place. Who has wooden booths anymore? I guess they were going for that rustic feel.” As soon as she sits down in a restaurant, she always lists the pros and cons, before we even get our drinks ordered. I don’t think she understands the concept of “bar and grill.”

“I’ll go order some drinks at the bar, be right back,” she says. I guess she did understand the concept.

I lean back in my seat and relax, but all of a sudden I start to catch the conversation going on in the booth behind me. 

A girl’s voice, “Have you ever thought about suicide? Not considered it, just thought about it.”

I can only imagine the person sitting across from her being taken aback by the first question then becoming even more confused after she revised it.

She continued without waiting for an answer, “I mean life is so messy, but isn’t death even messier? I mean not just literally, it’s messy for everyone around afterward.”

“At least you wouldn’t have to clean up,” the person across replies, probably attempting to lighten the mood, but maybe she didn’t hear the sarcasm, or maybe she just ignored it, but she still gives a serious response:

“Exactly, it’s complicated. You make this conscious decision to make this huge mess and create this new image of yourself, but you don’t even get to be there. Now you’re known as the person who killed himself or herself, and people talk about you in this sad way, and you forever live in infamy, or glory depending how you look at it, but you’ll never even know that you’ve become famous. Besides all of that, living is the real messy part. Suicide is an instant, life is years and years of mess and cleaning and mess again, and only a few of us become legends for living, and we all have to do it. One time I had this-“

“Hey honey, got you a beer. The bartender here is from my old town, isn’t that funny? Did you ever think that would happen?”

“No… I never thought about that.”