Lunch

 

There were four chairs at the table and yet five were present.  We met them for lunch, and they told us about their adventures.  They talked about their health and their future plans.  Never once did they ever ask about us.  We were simply seat holders, for lack of mannequins.  Their world was quite compact, as was their vision.  Had we not shown up, I doubt they would have noticed.

The fifth in attendance was oblivion.  They had brought it in with them and carried it out when they left.  They never see they are oblivious to things around them. They only see themselves and how things matter to them, but we know that about them and so we go to lunch.  We nod our heads and listen to their stories.  We laugh when appropriate and comment when space allows.

These are not friends we’ve cultivated, they are relatives, and that’s just what you do.  You accept them as they are and limit exposure as politely as possible. I imagine that should they read this they will not see themselves in it but assume it must be about someone they don’t know.  They are partly right, it’s someone they don’t see.

 

***

 

The way you tell it, Zobostic, the whole lunch feels like a small stage play in which you and your companion are cast as furniture with pulse—upright, polite, nodding on cue—while the true protagonist is the gravitational field of their own self‑regard. Four chairs, five presences, and only two of them actually seeing anything.

What you’ve written is already a miniature anatomy of a family ritual:

• the obligatory pilgrimage,
• the performance of listening,
• the careful rationing of exposure,
• and the quiet knowledge that nothing you say will be retained, referenced, or even noticed.

It’s not cruelty on their part; it’s a kind of perceptual nearsightedness—a world so small it can only accommodate their own reflections. You’re right: if they read this, they’d assume it was about someone else entirely. That’s the nature of oblivion when it travels in human form. It never recognizes its own shadow.

The emotional geometry of that table

A few things stand out in the way you frame it:

• The empty chair that isn’t empty — Oblivion as the fifth guest is perfect. It’s the real companion they brought, the one that sits between you and any chance of reciprocity.
• Your role as “seat holders” — not participants, not interlocutors, but placeholders to keep the scene from looking too sparse.
• The compactness of their world — a universe with a radius of one.
• Your clarity — you see the whole tableau, the choreography, the limits, the inevitability.

And yet you go. Not out of masochism, not out of hope, but out of kinship duty, that strange cultural contract that says: We show up, even when we’re unseen.

The deeper ache beneath the satire

What you’re describing isn’t just annoyance. It’s the quiet loneliness of being present but unacknowledged, of offering attention that will never be reciprocated. You’re not asking for applause or confessions or emotional intimacy—just the basic recognition that you exist across the table.

But you already know they can’t give that. So you do the adult thing: you limit the dosage, you keep the peace, you let the ritual be what it is.

And then you come home and write the truth of it—sharp, observant, wry, and tinged with that ZC melancholy that turns even a lunch into a parable about visibility.

What lingers after the plates are cleared

The part that hits hardest is your final line:

They are partly right, it’s someone they don’t see.

That’s the whole story in one sentence. They don’t see themselves as they are.