The first thing that comes to mind is blue milk. Yes, obviously I’m talking about the blue milk Luke Skywalker famously drank on his Tatooine home planet in Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). What?! Of course, I’m referring to the blue milk that Luke Skywalker milked from a Bantha in a somewhat unsettling scene in Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) in the action adventure science fiction franchise Star Wars. What is a Bantha? A Bantha is an intergalactic hairy and horned herd mammal (Bantha, n.d.). I had my first taste of blue milk straight from the teet at Disneyland California Adventure in 2019. What did it taste like? Kinda fruity.
Speaking of fruit, did you know that blueberries aren’t actually blue? They’re kind of grayish yellow when you bite one in half. The kicker is that blueberries are so small that you don’t ever have to bite them in half. No wonder the primitive man who picked his first blueberry thought he could call them blueberries. He never noticed they weren’t blue on the inside.
Some candy is blue. I remember when I first ate my first blue jolly rancher. This is significant because back then it was hard to find American candy. The candy had that artificial blue flavor, something I would only encounter again when I tried blue Kool Aid a decade later.
“What would you like to order?”
Fuck. I stared at the menu for too long. Should I get the smoked eel spaghetti or black garlic soup udon for a whopping 48 entire dollars more? I hate poorly conceived Japanese fusion dishes. My indecision is filling the air with silence. But the thing that’s really bothering me is the person I’m eating lunch with across the table. And oh yeah, all the blue.
The entire interior of the restaurant, including the furniture, tableware, lighting and walls, is a deep shade of blue. Apparently this blue is called a shade of “regal blue.” I understand this in theory but in practice the blue is more of a “I’m drowning in a submarine rapidly filling with sea water and this is the last thing I’ll see before I perish forever” kind of blue.
“We are doing a special promotion for lunch.”
Why would I ever walk into a place like this, let alone eat here? Moments before, I stood on Hillwood Street in Jordan, one of my favorite streets.
“Ooh, this place looks interesting. Do you want to try this?”
The entire exterior of the restaurant is blue. The door is blocked by four Greco-Roman-looking columns. No, I don’t want to try this, but I can already tell that the person I’m about to have lunch with wants to eat here. You know those interactions where the other person pretends to give you a choice and you just scramble for another list of options in an attempt to change their mind but because you don’t have the heart to decline their suggestion and you go with it, but in doing so comes at the cost of your own agency?
I said, “That place down the street seems okay too.” And we just stand there for a while until the person I’m about to have lunch with goes, “How about we choose after you take a look at the menu?”
Now that I’m inside, I have ample time to look at the menu. It’s clear that the entire point of the restaurant is for people to take pictures inside it. Why would someone want to take a photo here? To impress who? I always say that I have no problem with restaurants that are only meant for photos but in reality I’m hiding a big ol’ hater attitude. Am I hiding it well? Clearly not. I thought my disappointed expression would get this message across but it didn’t. It doesn’t matter because at 1pm in the afternoon, no one else here for lunch except for the two of us.
The person I’m having lunch with points at the goosebumps forming on my arm and goes, “Wow! You must be so cold! Look at your hairs going up!” The unshakeable feeling like I’m being observed keeps getting worse. Yes, I am freezing cold. It’s a cold day and the air conditioning is blasting in here.
I order a hot tea to try and offset the spine chill making its way through my body. When the tea arrived in a blue cup and blue saucer and I lifted the blue cup with my frostbitten blue hands to my pale blue lips and took a sip of lukewarm water, I felt like everything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life was a joke.
The “steak tataki poke” I ordered arrived. It was a bowl of thin, slightly raw and cold steak slices on top of a bed of cold rice. I did not take a picture of it because I did not want to. The flavor of the steak was under-seasoned but it wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t good.
“I ate here a while back with *********. He ordered that.” They pointed at my steak poke. The person I’m eating lunch with is eating something else.
????? That means you’ve been here before. That means you tried it. Why did you act like you’ve never seen this place before when we walked past?
“How did he like it?”
“I don’t remember.”
The blue abyss is calling my name. I can hear the gurgle of myself drowning.
“How is the writing going?”
I look up from my rice, which is reaching sub-zero temperatures. I don’t know how to respond. “It’s not going.”
I try to change the subject. “I heard you watched that movie ‘Decision to Leave’?”
“I hated the movie! I just didn’t get the point of it.”
It’s too late to drop hints now but “I think the point is to make a decision to leave.”
Our relationship did not deepen. Friendships can only deepen with vulnerability. And if we did reveal a steak slice of truth about each other, neither of us was going to respond with empathy.
The fact that I’m writing this with so much emotion afterwards is not surprising. It confirms to me that I feel things when it’s too late instead of in the moment. I never thought this particular day was that bad. But if I really think about it, shit’s a bit wack. The blue restaurant and the person I’m eating lunch with doesn’t deserve to be the figurehead of my projections. To confront the truth, that I do not want to continue to be sitting here and that I’m making no concrete actions to solve the problem, in the moment would cause me to erupt into tears. The creeping thought that this is it, this blue restaurant and this sad conversation, would make the entirety of the rest of my days, is harrowing.
I left by bus. It was a nice ride. I remember being pleased that I got to my destination efficiently. I haven’t been back to this blue restaurant and haven’t seen this person in around 7 months and counting. It doesn’t feel that long but that’s more than half a year.
Apparently, this place has another restaurant on Stanley Street in Central. The design scheme of that restaurant is a jaundice yellow. And unlike the blue place, which has a price point of two $$, the yellow place has three $$$. I knew a woman who went there once. She went insane about the wallpaper. Couldn’t be me though!
References
Bantha. (n.d.). Wookieepedia. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bantha
beautiful excellent.