This Story is Not About a Plate
At least, it’s not JUST about the plate
This morning, I ate a slice of toast off a plate that’s been in my life longer than anything else in our kitchen. It’s a small red appetizer plate, like the ones they had at Applebee’s in the early 2000s.
Well, actually, it is exactly a plate they had in Applebee’s in the early 2000s, because it literally came from an Applebee’s in the early 2000s.
This plate lived in my parents’ house throughout high school. It came with me to college, and when I moved into my first apartment after graduating, and again when I moved to Pittsburgh for grad school. It is the single non-matching dish that still lives in the kitchen cabinets I share with my now-husband.
Like most objects that have been around this long, the plate has a story.
In high school, I dated the same boy for two years. In retrospect, that was about a year and a half too long. Often, if I write or talk about this boy, it’s heavy stuff, about the complexities of being a teenage girl in an emotionally manipulative relationship. It was a difficult part of my young life and not one I like to think about often.
But it’s also where I got the plate.
