My favorite restaurant – this is not really about the restaurant at all, though. Restaurants aren’t really as much about the food as they are about the experience, are they?

I don’t go out to eat that much – hardly ever, actually. I have a 5, a 3, and a 2 year old, and my family’s on a single income, so restaurants aren’t really a part of our life unless it’s a special occasion.

Which is completely fine with me. I don’t even honestly really like eating at restaurants. One of my ED-related quirks is that I’m self-conscious about eating in front of other people. Even people I know well. I feel awkward asking the waiter for what I want to eat – it feels like such a personal question, “what do you want to eat?” Ugh, cringe.

And I’m vegetarian, and just generally particular about what I will and will not eat. Also, I kind of hate eating at the standard dinner hour, anymore. I can do breakfast – but when the heck am I ever out to eat at breakfast time? The idea is pretty laughable, lol. Lunch is okay if it’s light, like a salad or something, so if you’re planning on inviting me out to eat, please make it a lunch. I honestly hate “dinner.”

So when I think about my “favorite restaurant,” I don’t really think about places that I actively go. In fact, the one place that really comes to mind is a place I went one time, over twenty years ago, with my family.

It wasn’t even memorable for the food – I wasn’t even hungry, I think, when we went there; I was still basically a child, with a very intuitive, unworried, even bored perspective on food. My ED didn’t start to kick in until a few months later, early eighth grade.

It was evening, April 7^th, 2003, and the first night of a family mini-vacation that we were taking to Washington, DC, three hours from home. For whatever reason, that three-day, two-night trip is sealed in my memory bank as three of the best days of my life.

But why was it so great? It shouldn’t have been, actually. Things were hectic. My family was in the middle of buying a new house, back home. We had come to this vacation straight from the home inspection on the house that we were buying, and the inspection had been abysmal. I remember in one room my father could literally poke his finger straight through the floor, that’s how rotted it was. So, my parents were stressed, but doing their best to have a happy family vacation (I remember my dad getting the drunkest I’d ever seen him at the hotel bar that evening; he wasn’t incoherent or wobbly or anything, but he was noticeably goofy and his eyes were glassy). My older sister was pretty miserable the whole time, and seemed like she very much didn’t want to be there with her parents and dorky little sister; normally, I was very influenced by her moods, and kind of took my cue from her as to how I should feel or act. But I, age 13, was not at school, was on vacation, and felt cute in my new little red Marvin the Martian t-shirt from Kohl’s, was just having a great freaking time in my own little world.

I think it’s because I was in a good mental place, that spring. That was the spring that I first began writing about my four characters, whom you may know from this blog if you’re a regular. I’d just written or was just about to write the first story I ever wrote about them; about 20 or 30k words, I wrote it by hand on notebook paper, sitting on my bed in my childhood bedroom, listening to my Walkman. Doing this was like discovering a new drug. I was feeling pretty on top of the world about it. And, in a sort of childlike way, I felt like those characters were on that trip with me, and even kind of wove it into my little headcanon, telling myself that two of them actually met that very day, April eighth, at the same FYE where I went shopping at the mall there in DC. (Millennial moment: I so miss CD stores!)

There are so many memories of that trip that you’d think would be lame or even shitty, but they are all colored by the mood/headspace that I was in at the time, so they are wonderful: like, we’d booked a hotel online without knowing anything about it, and that hotel turned out to be, to my father’s horror, “extremely gay,” i.e. all decked out in art deco style, and he swore that the bartender was hitting on him (I don’t remember much about this, and did not have much of a concept of “gay” at the time, but did think the pink-and-black, 1920s-ish décor was pretty funky). Also, it rained. We got stranded in the rain, walking around the city, a few times. My poor sister, who was very goth at the time and had a ton of metal accessories all over her, got stopped a million times in the metal detector as we were entering the Washington Monument. I don’t think she even ended up coming in. I don’t remember. Stuff like that.

There are certain songs that I associate very much with that trip, too. At the FYE on April 8^th, there were three CDs that I bought: The Exies’ first, self-titled CD; “Faceless” by Godsmack (which had, apparently, just come out that same day; I was so hooked on the song “Straight Out of Line,” and tbh it still slaps); and, you’ll laugh, but the self-titled album from Trapt (“back off, we’ll take you on!!!” I thought that song was so freaking hardcore, when I was 13, and my besties and I used to like to “mosh” to it at school dances, lololl). But, most of all, the songs that I associate with that trip are by the band Stage. My sister, who was extremely uninterested in everything else about that trip, requested that my parents drop her off so she could stop in this weird, funky, punk-rockish little shop before we left, on our last day of the trip, which I guess she’d read about online or heard of from friends, and was eager to check out; and while in there, at the register, she picked up a free EP from this band we’d never heard of, called Stage. And on the way home, she let me listen to it on my Walkman. It was only three songs, but they were all straight fire, especially the second one, “The World Has Come Between Us.” To this day, that song affects me really strongly. It made me nostalgic, even at the time. I kind of think of it as one of the anthems of my life.

But, all of this to say that this whole awkward trip is weirdly idyllic in my memory. Back to the restaurant thing. On night one of this trip, my tired parents decided that they wanted Mexican food, which I was not interested in. I wasn’t even hungry, but it was whatever. So they found this restaurant – I can’t remember what it was called, but it was a really big restaurant with covered rooftop seating. And we got to sit up there on the roof.

I think I ordered a couple of soft tacos with no meat. Weird, I know, but when I was younger that was my go-to order, whenever I got taken to a Mexican restaurant. I wasn’t interested in spicy meat, so I would literally get flour tortillas with lettuce and cheese, and I thought it was freaking delicious. So I was pretty pleased with the food, but the best part was that it came with this little green plastic sword.

I was still a kid, at 13. I loved the little plastic sword. It delighted me. I was playing with it, goofing around with it, I don’t even remember. Then at some point I dropped it, and it fell between the planks on the floor and was gone. I was bummed, but, true to form, too shy to ask for a second one. So, without my permission and to my great embarrassment (I was still a kid, but enough of a teenager to be mortified), my sweet Dad asked the waiter for me if he would bring another green plastic sword.

I can’t remember, exactly, if the waiter brought me one and I managed to miraculously recover the original, or if the waiter, in a display of generosity, brought me two. I think the latter. I remember sitting there being like I HAVE TWO OF THEM NOW!! and just being over the moon. I didn’t even finish my tortillas; and not because I was watching my weight, that hadn’t happened to me yet. I was okay with my body! The food was fine but uninteresting. I was happy. It was the best dinner ever.

I still have those two green plastic swords, in a little box in my closet.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that AvPD is not a death sentence. Some aspects of it are not all bad. Living in the company of your made-up people that you came up with as a coping mechanism, can fill you with so much joy and delight, and it’s a happiness that nothing and no one can take away from you. It’s a happiness that can turn even the most basic circumstances into a fairytale. At least, that’s been my experience. Probably I also feel that way because, in addition to having AvPD, I have in the past been a true maladaptive daydreamer, and I enjoy writing and doodling very much – so that was pretty much the defining trifecta of my formative years. I wrote myself this little world to escape into. And, tbh, it still works for me, a lot of the time. I actually feel lucky and grateful to have had this trifecta of weirdness, because it gave me this made-up world that brings me so much joy. I used to think I would outgrow it one day, but here I am, 35 and a married mom and it’s still a huge part of me. I’m sure I will keep it forever.

It’s funny: almost all of my other memories of seventh and eighth grade are miserable and bleak, or are at least colored by that feeling of discomfort and awkwardness and loneliness. But this one silly little trip, which was not even objectively that great, remains logged in my memory as a golden time of pure joy. And that dinner, as one of the most memorable meals. May that generous waiter be abundantly blessed! Like my made-up people in my head, I will keep those green plastic swords forever.