Noodles, Coffee And Fountains Of Laughter

Hope for great and small things

The Kitchen Table - Jonathan Foster

1.

They slung themselves around the kitchen table, cynic-laughing like war veterans, comparing stories, revealing secrets, unveiling newly laid scars. They poured boiling water over gochujang noodles and laid saucers over their bowls to wait. 

Noodle sachets, nail polish, laptops and phones strewn about on bags and jackets, like wreckage from a storm. A tiny bluetooth speaker buzzing Deep House as I reached through the debris to rescue the kettle for coffee, like some benign poltergeist silently tidying things away.

We live in parallel worlds, my daughters and I, in the same space, but somehow misplaced, in different eras. I’ve long ago exited the phases they’re now entering. That wide-eyed lust, that appetite to be seen, to see, that pulsating fervour for entanglement, all thriving in them like a burgeoning tropical jungle. In me, more like tundra. 

Finger pumping screens and chopstick-stirring noodles, they talk of great and small things, folding conversations through one another, picking-up new threads and returning to old, dialogues wrangled with ease, fresh ones birthed along the way. They talk of love and trust and fear and intimacy. They talk of friends and celebrities and Netflix and work. They laugh and exclaim and make light of heavy things, then, floored by seeming nothings, they are suddenly wide-eyed and aghast at trivialities.

I spoon coffee into the large plunger because brewing coffee makes me visible. “Can we have one?” I’ve already got 4 cups lined up as I nod my head and make a sweeping gesture over the cups in gently irritable confirmation. Look, I’m already doing it.  

They flick between screen and face, mainlining WhatsApp or Snap, or Insta or Tok, in a perpetually evolving and ceaseless constellation of image and music and text, connected direct into their nervous systems they dance a peculiarly private dance on the most public of stages. 

I have long ago admitted defeat. I have watched them become addicted. I have accepted my powerlessness to intervene. I cannot compete with my stupid stories and ancient baubles. What allure has an analogue street lamp over the flashing neon of a digital Las Vegas? What charm has patience in a gimme gimme gimme snatch-a-thon? Besides, they, we, all of us, are addicted so there’s no wrenching this madness from our clenched fists.

As the noodles are slurped and their seeming never-sated hunger temporarily abated, they talked of hook-ups and flirtations, as if romance were a theatre of operations that required enormous attention and detailed planning. I poured the water and set the plunger lid in place and listened, and the more I tuned-in, the less clear everything became. 

2. 

They, all of us, but especially they, are folded into a world of ones and zero’s. 

We were once embedded in the gloriously patterning, ever-dripping phenomenon of the natural world, we were in tune with the rhythms, with small things, like the coming rain or the turning of the tide or the smell of changing seasons, like a rich river flowing in and out of our bodies and minds, embracing us and holding us fast to the world.

But now we’ve been turned and pointed toward a facsimile, a silicone castle of pretence, an ever enlarging self-referential bubble of nothingness that encourages a shadow of rage across the land.

They, all of us, but especially they, have become reservoirs into which rendered molten information is poured in the hope that it will cast exact replicas to be weaponised against each other, so that we might choose to be a one or a zero, in a forever wail against the other, one versus zero, zero versus one, powerful incantations to Be Like Me Or Be My Enemy, as the silicone castle becomes the plaything of angry divisive self-important, self-promoting Billionaire men with one eye on some insane goal and the other firmly in the mirror. Dangerous egomaniac men. Seemingly unstoppable men. 

And yet. And yet.

3. 

They all talked at once, layers of voices, a four part cacophony crescendoing into a fountain of laughter that splashed around the kitchen like raining joy. I am soaked in euphoria. Now they volley short sentences back and forth, overlaying one on top of another, speaking in harmonic disharmony, all telling a story they all know, until, once more a geyser of unified hilarity bursts forth. 

They hardly acknowledge the coffee appearing before them. Their performative nonchalance is strangely satisfying precisely because they are so genuinely at ease. I hear my mind’s soliloquy, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, and I think of how we are both the performer and audience in our own lives, a hall of mirrors, layers upon layers.

As they laugh and talk they grab handfuls of crisps and with their increasingly oily, salty fingers they poke their screens and sip their coffee and drum along to Deep House with their chopsticks they talk of the future. 

And even though they know, and they do know that they live in a broken world, they still see great possibilities blossoming before them, they’re still delirious with hope and promise, even though the future has taken to its bed, ailing with unknowns and uncertainties, calling out for immediate attention in a world distracted.

Still they refuse to be broken by the will of circumstance. They are not naive, nor cynical, nor foolhardy, nor delusional. They know there are no brakes to slam, there are no rudders to wrench, there are no words to scream or songs to bellow or gods to implore. 

But they will not go quietly into the night. They resist the past which has dragged them, all of us, to this precarious place, that treacherous past in its infinite forms, thrusting itself into their present, pressing on them, making demands, making threats. They say you must learn from the past. They have.

They know the future must be born from the present. They know when they are met by a world full of fury and fear and absurdity, they can only open their arms and embrace the chaos and whisper it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, as if the present were an invalid hanging from the wreckage of history.

Another burst of laughter cascades around me and for a fleeting moment, I watch them be themselves, these young humans, brimming with life, and I suddenly know that when left alone, these warm powerful female souls might just undo all the wrongs the past has done. And I sip my coffee. And smile.

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