I was walking through my town the other day. The town where I live now... the town where I grew up. I've lived in different parts of it, left it a few times, and spent a fair amount of time telling myself I was eventually going to get out for good.
I'm still here. Apparently, I'm either loyal or terrible at following through.
I was listening to one of those wonderfully cheesy 80s radio station... the kind that makes you remember songs you forgot you knew... when "Always Something There to Remind Me" came on. I've always liked that song. Mostly because it sounds exactly like an 80s song should sound: slightly dramatic, slightly melancholy, like somebody in a Members Only jacket is about to walk in.
I was walking past an old restaurant when it happened. I'd been there years ago, for a party. My kids were little. Really little. I looked through the window and saw a chair.
Just a chair. But I knew that chair.
I remembered sitting in it that night. So I stopped, right there on the sidewalk, staring through the window at a restaurant chair like it had called me by my first name. Someone inside probably wondered if I was waiting for a table or planning a burglary. I was doing neither. I was remembering.
What surprised me was how many chairs I remember. Not the chairs themselves... where I sat, who sat beside me, who was across the table. The birthday parties. The Christmas dinners. The restaurants. The kitchen tables.
We sit in chairs every day without a second thought. We get up, go home, forget about them. Until years later, we see one again, and somehow the whole room comes back. The faces. The voices. The life.
That chair reminded me how many people have occupied the chairs in mine. Some I remember exactly where they sat. Some I can still hear laughing. Some I wish were still there. Others, if I'm honest, I'm grateful to see empty.
Sometimes I'm the reason the chair is empty.
There's one in particular. I won't tell you the whole story... some things aren't mine alone to tell, but I'll say this much... I emptied that chair myself, on purpose, and I still don't know, all these years later, if it was the right call. I've made peace with it. Most days. But peace isn't the same as certainty, and I've stopped waiting for the second one to show up.
For a while I called that indifference. Told myself not caring was a kind of strength. Maybe I just needed to believe that. The world is hard sometimes.
People leave. People change. People die. Sometimes you don't get the conversation you thought you would. Some things get repaired. Some don't. Not every story gets a neat ending, and I'm finally getting a little more comfortable with that. An empty chair doesn't always need to be filled. Sometimes you just notice it. You remember who used to sit there. You let yourself miss them. Or, sometimes, you don't.
Then you look around the table. Erin and my kids are there. A few people I trust are there too. And somehow, the empty chairs don't seem quite as loud.
I looked through the glass a moment longer. The restaurant was still there. The chair was still there. But the night I remembered was gone.
So I kept walking. And for a long time, I thought moving on meant forgetting the empty chairs. Maybe it just means learning to sit at the table anyway.
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