A Moment of Revery, I Beg of You

I am weeping tears of golden syrup. Sticky and tempting, they drift slowly down my barren, dry and broken cheeks. Chiding the miserable ache in my heart, the hunger pains subsist, clawing at my now hollow interior. Where once there were biscuits, now there is darkness, where once there were free refills, now the subtle echo of the sticky tear, breaking free of my chin so languidly and falling, lone and stoic, to the tile floor, mocks the freight train of tragedy burrowing through my soul. I call out into the darkness, into the void, fists hurled toward the sky, a single dollar bill crushed in the white-knuckled confines of my clenched fingers, where, where the fuck, has the Waffle House gone?

I never had the chance to purchase my commemorative mugs. I was waiting, with bated breath, for Christmas season, where the festivities were sure to once again overwhelm the whiteboard, sending the employees into glorious, rapturous artistic fits, their rustic approaches to modern art stunning me into silence with each unvieling. Without our center, where will the people express themselves? Where else can we gather to worship at the waffle, absolutely any hour of the day?

They had coffee. They had booths. They had air conditioning. They had free wifi signal. They had an egg and cheese biscuit for ONE DOLLAR. Briefly, consider what else you can purchase in this world for the measly sum of one dollar that can possibly provide you with the same sensations of joy of as a perfectly cooked egg nestled into a golden brown biscuit. Nothing, goddamnit, nothing can compare. Not for one dollar. Aside from the bacon, which, for one more dollar, you can add, but realize you run the risk of overwhelming yourself. They had a jukebox, and my friends loved to play “Special Lady,” humming contentedly with both hands clutching four biscuits, at three thirty in the morning, after smoking weed, drinking beer and dancing like idiots for, potentially, days. I would mention the hashbrowns but, since I heard the news, any word even rhyming with or resembling “smothered” “covered” or “chopped” has reduced me to a useless blob of inundating sadness, those irritating syrupy tears drifting down my cheeks again. And no one likes to clean up a mess like that. No one has TIME to clean up a mess like that.

You tell me, quiet, child, IHOP remains. Denny’s is open. Mr. Z’s serves pizza till like 3 am, or something. I tell you, good sir, you know nothing. Clearly, you have not known the Waffle House as I once did. You have not spent many sleepless nights, and mornings, diagraming art and boat projects on her flat, glorious wide booth tables, ketchup in one hand, tiny plastic bucket of strawberry jelly in the other. Perhaps, when you travel to the southern regions of this vast country, the sight of anything yellow, black and square does not cause you to quiver with delight and camaraderie. You have never conversed with Dinah, the late night creator of waffles. You have never been served a waffle with cigarette ash on it. You have never been ditched by some idiot on a Harley Davidson and found friends behind the counter ready to relate, sustenance on the griddle to shoo the blues away and the general aura of southern hospitality at its economical finest to hug you into its arms, cradling you, like the tired and lowly child you are. And, ah, how I pity you. Your life will end lacking the same flavor and depth that i have known, if here you remain. With another swift and tragic swipe of the sickle blade of progress, Key West has lost her Waffle House. Lost! The Waffle House will open her doors no more. I beg of you, a moment of silence, of homage, of revery. I see you all, running around in December in your flippy floppies, paddling your paddleboards, surfing on your waterskimajiggers, casually listening to Jimmy Buffet whilst sipping on a margarita beside the southernmost point wearing a neon colored t-shirt and doing your damnedest to ignore the pain in your heart. Ignore it, and it will choke you, islanders! Allow the grief to flood through you like a river. Or, maybe like an incoming, full moon tide, to be more relatable. Do not ignore it. The Waffle House is Dead. It has died. There is no return, for the Waffle House, from this death. Together, we hang our heads in homage, and we tuck our dollar bills back into our bras, where we first retrieved them, anyway, saving them for another town, another Waffle House, another memory, another biscuit, a syrupy tear upon our cheek, a paper hat upon our heads.