We huddled around the table, shoulders hunched, our faces hovering over heaping plates of pad thai and panang curry. It wasn’t just any awkward silence we suffered through, it was the worst kind of awkward silence. It was the peculiar flavor of awkward silence that can only happen on a first date—and not the kind which is pregnant with tension and possibility, either. Oh no. This was the kind that follows the moment when you both kind of know that there’s not going to be a second date.
And this during the plague times, when even meeting had been a risk. Really, how had we gotten each other so wrong?
Well, because we met online of course.
Text—which until this very day had been our only method of communication—just didn’t convey everything we needed it to. There are acres of context in a hello, a thousand tiny character details in the way a person smiles, a Wheel-of-Time-novel-sized-backstory hidden in whether a person’s tone rises or falls at the end of a statement. All these things and a billion more are accessible to us when we meet in person, or when we’re experiencing a scene in person, or when we’re listening to dialogue in person.
The silence was loud, not because silence can really be loud, but because by some auditory trick, things that were normally quiet were yelling at us. The wood of chopsticks as they tap a plate, the quiet chewing, the sound of the air conditioner cutting off.
“The food’s good,” she said.
And it was. The panang curry was sweet with coconut milk and spicy with the touch of chili powder and the essence of the sliced green peppers which had been soaking in it. It was warm. The jasmine rice was nice and sticky.
Our eyes met for a moment, both of us somehow communicating to the other that we knew this date should never have happened. There wasn’t much we could do, though, other than attempt to enjoy the company of a perfect stranger, a person we’ll never see again, as we ate.
“The spring rolls particularly,” I said.
She grunted a little because she agreed but couldn’t say so while she was chewing.
Interesting, isn’t it, that here we were, eating together because we weren’t better writers. Because we couldn’t convey to each other what we were like in text. And that’s the moral of the story, as if written by Aesop himself. It’s important to take the time to make sure your words convey all you mean them too. But don’t worry. Sometimes, when you mess up, there’s still Thai food.
Interesting focus on words. They are treacherous. That's why words that don't convey meaning are so popular. Some of the most successful politicians are those who can speak the longest without saying anything ("a post-structuralist analysis"). Some writers can figure out how to manipulate words without being manipulated.
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