At Sapere Supper Club, the table chooses you.
There are no reservations. No menus. No requests. You walk in, and a napkin with a single word—or sometimes a shape—finds you. The candlelight flickers with intention. The scent of bergamot or burning cedar guides your pace. You’re seated not with who you hoped for, but with who you need.
It’s not magic. Not exactly. It’s memory, maybe. Or intuition distilled into ritual.
That night, I arrived to find myself alone at a table tucked beside a bookshelf of forgotten almanacs. No napkin. No companion. Just a low flame and a glass of something aged.
Until I noticed them.
Two women at the adjacent table—close enough to overhear, far enough not to intrude. The older one had the kind of Southern drawl you couldn’t fake if you tried. Mississippi, maybe. Polite, but with gravel in it. A voice like a back porch on a humid night.
She wore her hair up and her glasses down, sipping from a teacup without ever glancing inside. The younger woman across from her, all angular and anxious, looked like someone who’d just been undone by something—or someone—she hadn’t seen coming.
“Can I ask you somethin’ without you rollin’ your eyes?”
“I reckon I can’t promise anything,” the older one replied, setting her cup down. “But I’ll listen like I mean it.”
The younger one leaned forward. “Why does it hurt so bad when someone leaves, even if you know they weren’t good for you?”
The older woman took a long pause, then smiled—but not kindly. More like a scientist who finally sees the pattern in the data.
“Baby,” she said, “have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?”
And from there, she was off.
She explained how two particles—born together, split apart—could still reflect each other’s movements across vast distances. Spin one clockwise, the other spins counter. Instantly. Regardless of space or time.
No signal. No transmission. No message between them.
Just connection.
“Now, I ain’t sayin’ love is a particle,” she added, stirring her tea with the same rhythm she’d used to pace the story. “But I am sayin’ people get entangled, and they don’t always un-entangle when the walkin’ away part happens.”
The younger woman blinked. “So you’re saying I’m quantum-bonded to my ex?”
“I’m sayin’ you’re feeling the spin,” the older one smiled. “You think he’s gone, but some part of you is still reactin’ to the version of him you used to dance with.”
She tapped the table.
“And here’s the cruel bit: You’ll keep reactin’ until that entanglement de-coheres. And no one really knows how that happens—not even the folks at CERN.”
Silence. Then a question.
“So what do I do with it?”
And here, the older woman shifted. Her posture softened. Empathy snuck in—rare, deliberate.
“You give it time,” she said. “And you do somethin’ with the signal. You write. You walk. You play sad songs backwards if you have to. But you let the spin move through you, instead of lettin’ it define you.”
The younger one looked down at her lap.
“And when it still hurts?” she whispered.
“You let it. For a while. Hurt means it mattered. Hurt means you were alive in it. But remember—pain’s just information, honey. Same as joy. It don’t own you unless you forget it’s a message.”
At that moment, my own napkin arrived.
Folded. Crisp. Inked in looping cursive with a single word: Stay.
I looked up. The staff smiled, but said nothing. My supper companion would not be arriving. Not tonight.
Instead, I remained seated—entangled in the wisdom of a woman from Mississippi who taught quantum mechanics with teacups and heartbreak.
And somewhere between the science and the silence, something inside me… unspun.
🎙 This quiet observation is part of The Deductionists—a league of legendary minds unraveling the peculiar and profound. Because if we don’t question it, who will?
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