I Knew the Restaurant Before I Walked In

A friend was excited to take me to a little family restaurant she had just discovered, tucked down a side street I had genuinely never walked. I had never heard of it. I had never seen a photo. There is no way I had been there.

And yet, standing in the doorway, I was flooded with the heaviest deja vu of my life, so strong it made me put a hand on the frame. I knew this room. I told my friend, quietly, before we sat, that there was a cracked tile near the register, third from the corner, and there was. I told her the clock on the back wall was broken and stuck, and it was, its hands frozen at 4:20. I told her, half-laughing to cover how strange I felt, that a waiter was about to drop a tray by the kitchen door.

A moment later a young waiter came through the swinging door with a tray of waters, caught his foot on the threshold, and dropped the whole thing with a crash that turned every head in the place. My friend looked at me like she had never seen me before.

I could not tell her how I knew, because I do not know how I knew. I had no memory of ever having been told these things. It was not a guess. It was recognition, the exact feeling of remembering a place you have been a hundred times, applied to a place I had been zero.

The rest of the meal I sat with the low hum of already-having-done-this, naming small things a beat before they happened, until I made myself stop because it was scaring me. The food was good. I have never gone back. I am a little afraid of what else I would recognize.