being rinnah

He slung one arm over my shoulder, drawing me to his side.

For one moment, by his side, I was warm, safe and secure. It seemed the most natural and familiar thing to do and it was a place that I never wanted to leave, to be by his side, with him. I looked up and thought to say as much even as he grinned boyishly at me and bent his head to listen to what I was trying to say.

And all of a sudden I woke up before I could speak. Alone, bereft and cold.

Pah, I muttered to myself. It was only a dream. But still, the warmth lingered in my memory and the sense of being loved for that one instant remained.

What would I give for that dream to be reality! I blame it on having been overly taxed beyond my limits over the weekend. And on missing him. Too much.

“I like to watch the way you eat,” someone said recently.

It was merely an observation voiced aloud, but somehow it got me thinking because the thought that people would watch me eat felt so… intimate?… for me. Errr… like there could be some vulnerable part of me you could decipher from the way I hold my fork or the way I drink my soup.

Maybe it stems from my watching The Mirror Has Two Faces (in 1996 - my goodness! 12 whole years ago) when I was young and impressionable. You know, that part where Gregory (Jeff Bridges) is watching Rose (Barbra Streisand) eat her salad. She always had to eat in a particular, almost ritualistic way - divvying up her greens, turning the plate, making sure there was a little bit of everything on the fork… all in search of the “perfect bite”.

Not to say that I take every meal in search of that “perfect bite”, but just that I like to make my spoonfuls/forkfuls very, very precise. And if I have more than one dish on my plate, I make sure I eat from each dish in rotation, just so my palate gets some variety in the midst of my meal. Or I leave my plate really clean and strip the last bit of flesh from the bone. I don’t know. It’s just… the way I eat!

But as I was searching the Internet in a vain attempt to find the exact particular words that Gregory uses to describe Rose’s quirky habit, I found this lovely blog post that perfectly expresses what I’m trying to say about how I felt. Or something like that. About when someone watches me eat.

Heaven forbid that I should think about the process of eating in any other way, but it’s just… unnerving, I guess.