Rosemary Chicken Sandwich

I didn't know what I felt anymore. The strain of watching him fall apart left me numb, and by the third week of August I was walking around in a trance. The only thing that mattered to me at that point was to keep up an impassive front. No tears, no bouts of despair, no lapses of will. I exuded hope and confidence, but inwardly I must have known how impossible the situation really was. This was not brought home to me until the very end, however, and I learned it only in the most roundabout way. I had gone into a diner for a late-night supper. One of the specials that evening happened to be chicken pot pie, a dish I had not eaten since I was a small boy, perhaps not since the days when I was still living with my mother. The moment I read those words on the menu, I knew that no other food would do for me that night. I gave my order to the waitress, and for the next three or four minutes I sat there remembering the apartment in Boston where my mother and I had lived, seeing for the first time in years the tiny kitchen table where the two of us had eaten our meals together. Then the waitress came back and told me they were out of chicken pot pies. It was nothing at all, of course. In the large scheme of things, it was a mere speck of dust, an infinitesimal crumb of antimatter, and yet I suddenly felt as though the roof had caved in on me. There were no more chicken pot pies. If someone had told me an earthquake had just killed twenty thousand people in California, I would not have been more upset than I was at that moment. I actually felt tears forming in my eyes, and it was only then, sitting in that diner and wrestling with my disappointment, that I understood how fragile my world had become. The egg was slipping through my fingers, and sooner or later it was bound to drop.

-Moon Palace, Paul Auster