Denny's: For Those Times When the Edges of Reality Fray

I feel as though I’ve been here before. Sitting in a Denny’s, looking at the menu and not knowing why I’m here.

I look out the window at people walking. There are people around me in the restaurant. I feel numb. Disconnected with everyone. Even the voices and conversations around me seem muffled, as though we’re not really in the same place. Perhaps they’re not real or I’m not real. Everyone is out of focus and muffled, except the waiter. He blinks in and out of different worlds.

That is what it really is; they have their world and I have mine. They can come out of their world and briefly show up in mine, but I cannot escape from my world into theirs. Occasionally they blink into my world, only to blink out again just as quickly. But mostly they stay in their world with the obscuring barrier separating us.

And, thus, I end up at Denny’s where the coffee flows 24/7 and I can have some breakfast at any time of the day. Denny’s: the place I go when I’m caught in an existential quandary. I start walking and all of a sudden my feet have taken me to Denny’s, perhaps because I am conditioned since this numbness and constant questioning of my own and others’ existence and reality usually comes upon me in the early hours of morning and Denny’s was always one of the few places that was close and open.

Now I’m in a city where there are many restaurants open 24hrs and I can get just about any food I want, but I shun them all. My feet take me to Denny’s, because in those moments (hours? Years?) when I doubt the strength of reality, none of those places truly exist. When I’m too far gone to be reached by anyone or anything else, Denny’s is the only place that can penetrate into my reality and make itself on the same level of existence as I am.

Yes, Grand Slams really are the glue that holds the universe together.