I’m at a different diner tonight.

I actually like this one better than my usual location but the distance might not make this a regular occurrence.

What is it about diners and me you ask?

In my ‘formative’ years I had a friend at work. She turned me onto diners. In her part of town there were easily 5 and we hung out a lot in her part of town. Back then I was a 20 something year old kid who’d been given a job she didn’t know how to do, in a building with a bunch of men who didn’t want to respect me but also understood that I was the reason they had a job to begin with, and she was literally the ONLY other woman on the team.

Turned out she was also gay, somewhat openly and this was a time of my life where even though I knew of my attraction to women, I hadn’t yet acted on it.

She was also one of the first people who’s energy attracted me over their person. Perhaps I should say she was one of the first that I noticed. In theory we had nothing in common other than the fact we both were attracted to women, but there was an energy about her which drew me to her. She respected me as an individual, she mentored me loosely. I grew by leaps an bounds in my years at that job, I learned some tough lessons at that job. I would not be who I am now without that job and lots of that formation happened with Roxie in diners. Roxie is also a part of how lots of you met kinky me.

She isn’t kinky at all, but I listened to her when I was about to give The Man the 🥾

He and I had only had 1 date but that thing which I can now identify as compulsion was there. He’d set me a text message saying he had to go out of town for 2 weeks for work. There was something about the exchange which set off all my warning bells, and when I didn’t hear from him at all in that 2 week period mentally I checked out.

I remember sending him a text saying I hoped he had a wonderful life. He called me within the hour. The caller ID box [yes they were once boxes and optional] said Dallas, and even though my radar kept going off the sound of his voice lured me back in and my choice to cut him loose was less solid. He asked if. He could see me when he got back in town and my response was maybe. It was Roxie who convinced me to say yes. Her logic was that when I spoke about him I sounded different. She started referring to him as her son in law after that. When he got back in town and I was in his space again, it was a wrap.

During those first six months of my relationship with him, most of my conversations with her about him happened in a diner. After our first breakup I went at least once a month to the diner where I asked him the question he never answered and contemplated what if.

In the many many years later diners have been stops on trips where I knew I could get a decent enough meal not in styrofoam. It’s always been a place one – one being me -can go and sit and write. How I write has evolved over the years. Even though for the important stuff I may still pull out a spiral notebook and #2 pencil, in general it is a laptop or a tablet these days. I can sit here for hours though when I need to bang something out. I an drink too much coffee and look out the window too long if the words aren’t flowing.

This Diner has sushi. Even though I am on a let’s try it path, I am going to say my decision to not try the sushi tonight is self love. I have another viewing of Endgame scheduled after this and I am not interested in spending any part of those 3 hours in the bathroom.

Aphrodite Brown