The Dinner Table

The theme is virtues and values. It will go further into this theme after the story. Work in progress/sneak peek.

The Falls

The shutter button clicked under the pressure of Jazmine’s finger as she and Dylan huddled in front of the rapids and beamed at the camera.

The water roared behind them, a rush that was chaotic at all the right places but calm where it mattered, much like the two of them. “This is what life is supposed to feel like,” Jazmine thought as the handsome smile on the other end of the lens grasped hold of her heart.

Nothing could penetrate their aura. It was like the rest of the world was happening around them. They were the beautiful couple that everyone else envied. The ones that had it figured out. Liberation surged through her stronger than the waterfall that had brought them there.

The love she had left behind in Louisiana felt unreachable from the New York cliff she gazed out over.

Dylan wrapped his arms around her in a sturdy embrace.“You ready, pretty lady?”

A spark flickered between his lips and her eyes. He knew that term of endearment was her weakness. She hardly noticed his hands interlaced with hers, leading her to a connecting park where human clusters conversed on blankets and rustic tables, creating a perfect mosaic of human connection.

Jazmine skipped over to the picturesque collection of food trucks.

“No, no. We’ve been here long enough,” Dylan protested.

“But we’re already here, and I’m exhausted. And look, that one even has Veggie burgers!”

“Oorrr, hear me out… You could just eat real food,” Dylan retorted.

“Eh, it’s fine,” Jazmine sulked. “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”

She was more than satisfied to wait if it meant walking back to the hotel with him.

Jazmine, The Prude

Behind the locked door, Jazmine ran her fingertips across the rustic leathery surface of Dylan’s dopp kit on the bathroom counter. A wave of victory silently cascaded through her as she reminisced on the times that Dylan would text her mirror selfies from his business trips. Now she was in the action, helping create them. Something about seeing the wooden brushes and sage beard oil felt intimate.

His passport, neatly balanced on various ticket stubs and parking passes, made her smile. She always wanted to travel, and now she could—with him. Everything just felt aligned.

Clattering noises on the other side of the door snapped her out of a trance, like a new awakening. The night wasn’t over yet. She was ready to put on her best bubbly personality for game night. Her dark eyes shone with overcompensation, then trailed behind her like pesky toilet paper stuck to the bottom of a shoe.

“Want a cup of Joe?” Dylan asked.

She leaned against the counter, mustering up all of the “come hither” vibes she could recall from the Cosmopolitan magazines she had read in her early 20s.

“Always,” she winked.

“That was stupid,” she thought.

Amusement played across his face as Jazmine watched a generous amount of Jim Beam spew into his mug. The amber splurge made her nose unintentionally scrunch up, betraying her calm and collected facade. Alcohol triggered discomfort for her.

“Oh, don’t be a prude,” he sassed.

“I’m still feeling the buzz from last night!” she protested.

Was that an eye roll she just witnessed?

Hot Wheels

“They’re here,” he read from his phone.

The evening with friends turned into night with the regular random life updates from strangers and pretending to care.

“That’s why I don’t have kids or a wife right now,” Dylan laughed. “So that I can do whatever I want and have all 5 bedrooms as a display of Hot Wheels if I want.”

Doubt thundered in Jazmine’s eyes. This side of him was strange compared to what she was used to.

“Wait, you have 5 rooms in your home? What do you do?” his friend gawked.

“Make a lot of money is what I do,” Dylan gloated.

“Awkward,” Jazmine’s modesty peeped in her brain.

The friends hooted, “Well, next round is on Dylan!”

Dylan fist bumped in the air. “Yeah, actually, forget this. Let’s go party! Get dressed, Jaz, we’re going!”

The smell of liquor and rum concoction exuded off of Dylan stronger than holy trinity seasoning at the local gumbo cook-off.

“I was really looking forward to a calm game night,” Jazmine whispered.

“Ok, be boring then,” Dylan shrugged.

“Fine, let’s go,” Jazmine gave in.

Although Frenchman Street was more crowded than ever, Jazmine could feel her head and heart growing wider and further apart.

The Dinner Table Conversation

Jazmine’s head still felt like concrete as she dragged herself to the dinner table the next day.

The two sat across from one another, both out of the energy or concern to sustain entertaining one another, which was actually a good thing. More natural.

Dylan showed up with a purpose.

“I want to have kids one day,” he blurted out.

“What about the traveling job?” Jazmine questioned.

“Well, I can still travel, you know. Everyone thinks you can’t do things when you have kids, but that’s the problem with this generation. A bunch of sissies. I don’t need my kids around me all the time.”

Dylan continued, “I mean, all this ‘sitting at the dinner table as a family’ is so unnecessary,” he said with air quotes.

He shrugged his shoulders, “My parents left me alone all the time. Sometimes, I hardly saw them, and I was fine.”

A domineering dinner table seemed to tower over Jasmine like a shadow dementor.

“Sitting together is exactly what I do want,” Jazmine’s inner voice spoke up.

Jazmine scrutinized his reasoning, “Yeah, but you can’t take your kids with you when you’re traveling for work…”

Dylan cut in, “I’d have the child’s mom for that. Plus, my parents. Like I said, I don’t need to see my kids all the time. Even my wife, I’m not into this calling every other day stuff. It’s too much. My wife will have to know that I’ll be gone traveling a lot of the time. She’ll be independent enough for that.”

“Every other day?” Jazmine choked.

She was used to talking to her partner multiple times a day. Her mind couldn’t help but to go back to Owen, the person she was supposed to be forgetting.

Broken looks between Jazmine and Dylan became a border between the affections Jazmine shared with this man and other desires of her soul.

She started to imagine what life with Dylan would look like in reality compared to the life that she wanted to surround herself with. The life she had known and could possibly still have with Owen played in the background.

Mouse in a Maze

That night, Jazmine’s thoughts darted around like a mouse in a maze .

“I’ve been drinking more with Dylan in just a few weeks than I have all year. He says that ‘it isn’t a big deal’ because he could slow down if he ever got serious with someone, but something inside of me doubts that. I doubt his words.”

There was a part of Jazmine who wanted to be the person that Dylan seemed to have his mind set on. She wanted him to be her person… but as she looked at what truly mattered (or didn’t matter) to both of them, the disconnect gouged at the core of her heart.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just about him. It was about her, too. It was about her future children. Jazmine had to sit alone with her virtues and values under inspection- no, under interrogation.

She had already discovered that adventure was one of her values. Adventure was inevitable with Dylan, but feeling like that spontaneity would replace a home, transmuted that value into a shadow. Sure, it was one of her values, but it wasn’t the top priority.

A vision lived inside of her of being that woman who finally made Dylan’s dream of holding his firstborn son come true. Not because she wanted to be a mother, but because she wanted to finally feel enough—for him. The respect he would have for her. The way she would strut, belonging to him.

However, the value of self-worth and modesty came back to haunt her, whispering that the dynamic did not sit right.

As she sat with the values that truly created the bigger picture, the clearer that picture became. Although she loved traveling, her person was someone who would be home every night-and more importantly, wanted to be home every night. Someone who would pick up the kids-and the phone. An open ear to listen to her rant about the random moments in her day. Someone who would make her proud and be proud of her in ways that Dylan seemed to be oblivious to. Someone more like Owen.

Her mind kept going back to the foreboding dinner table.

A life with Dylan showed an empty table.

An empty table with discomfort, loneliness, and arrogance. In a situation in which she thought the necessary values and virtues were eye to eye, she now realized were always teetering on a collection of unbalanced pedestals. At least, when it came to how she and Dylan viewed the world.

Inner Interrogation

She still couldn’t think about Dylan without adoration. She flushed at the memory of his cheeky demeanor when he had bought earrings for her. She thought about the way he seemed to accept her thoughts without questioning them. She loved that he knew how to apologize. She thought about how vulnerability swallowed him when he opened up about his real feelings. The things that drew her in so easily.

On the other hand, she thought about how jealousy turned him into another person, especially when he drank. How she remained a secret at his family gatherings. How they couldn’t make future plans together “just in case.” And the times he had told her not to complain about her job because it was just so much easier than his.

Sharp words and discombobulated actions replayed through the tunnels of her intuition. The alcohol. The money comment. The passive aggressiveness towards her ideas of fun. It wasn’t like Dylan was wrong for any of these things, but where naivety had once highlighted her feelings for him, wisdom revealed those that she had chosen to ignore. And for every pang when thinking about Dylan, there was safety when thinking about Owen.

Jazmine had to analyze the virtues and values fostered by Dylan: adventure, fun, and glam, with the virtues and values she found in Owen: a splash of those things with safety, family, and reliability.

She thought about how she had brought this upon herself by falling too fast, too blindly, without putting the right things into perspective. If only she had had a firm grasp of this self-knowledge before.

She kept thinking about…that dinner table.

In the End

The soft hands that yearned to be held by his were the same ones that sent the message to Dylan that it was over. Their love wasn’t the right kind of love for either of them to truly be fulfilled.

Although Jazmine formulated the message, in the end, she felt like she had broken her own heart. Because she had always known who Dylan was and what he wanted. Yet, she stepped into a mess anyway and dragged someone else through it. Why? Because it was never him that she did not know. It was her virtues and values that she had allowed to become strangers.