time and space

There’s a mall not too far from my house. It’s undergone name and structural changes since I used to hang out there in high school, and even since I worked there back in the late 90s. I was employed at a restaurant called My π. Get it? My Pie? Yes, we sold pizza. Delicious, deep dish pizza, along with myriad other menu items. The restaurant was in the front of the mall, visible from the main road, an anchor to the hundreds of stores within the shopping center.

I loved working there. I managed the place as well acting as waitress and bartender when needed. I spent a good portion of my days and nights there, waiting tables, guiding the staff, making salads. The restaurant closed in early 1998 when the owner decided he’d had enough of the business.

The place where My π used be is now a Panera Bread. Before that it was a bookstore, before that a video store. And though the structure isn’t the same, there still exists a thin layer of the restaurant where I used to work. I walk into Panera, and I am transported back. I know the exact place between the kitchen and dining room where we’d all take smoke breaks, leaning against a counter, talking about our lives or the customers. I can mark out where each table was, the bar, the desk where I made out the weekly schedule, the workstation where I hung out with the cooks as they made pizza and burgers. I feel it, there’s a presence there that’s solid, as if everything exists in layers, past mingling with the present, one on top of the other.