There were towers in the city. Concrete towers. Glass towers. Towers that rose like teeth from the earth, biting at the sky. Some of them were crooked, some of them were proud, but all of them were tall and all of them stood alone. The people inside the towers looked out of them and down at the others, and when they walked the streets, they hurried with their eyes averted, as if ashamed of what they had made. But they did not stop building them.
You could say we built them because we were cold. Or scared. Or proud. Maybe we wanted to be seen from far away. Or maybe we just didn’t want to be touched. A tower is a good thing when you want to see the world and avoid it all at once. There’s a certain loneliness that feels like safety if you don’t look at it too long.
I knew a man once who lived on the fiftieth floor of a tower made of black stone. He had a leather chair and an ice bucket and a long view of the ocean that no one else could see. He told me the view was the only friend he needed. I asked him if the view ever spoke back. He didn’t answer, but I noticed he always poured two drinks.
I think it starts when we’re young. We build forts out of cushions and call them castles. Then we grow up and turn them into office buildings and call them success. But the idea’s the same. Stay in. Keep others out. Don’t let the bad things touch you. Don’t let the soft parts show.
But a table is something else. A table is flat and wide and low. It doesn’t rise or isolate. It waits. A table asks for company and demands nothing else. You can’t sit at a table without being seen, and you can’t hide in a corner when there are none. There is no prestige in a table. Only presence.
We used to eat together more. Talk more. We passed things with our hands and listened to stories that came with the bread. People said what they really thought between mouthfuls, and when someone cried, no one had to send an email about it later. The tears just stayed on the table next to the salt, and no one pretended they weren’t there.
I am not romantic about things. I know tables can be broken too. I’ve seen families eat in silence. I’ve seen lies served hot and dessert skipped out of bitterness. A table can hold cruelty as easily as kindness. But still, it is harder to lie when you’re chewing. And it is harder to hate when you’ve just handed someone the butter.
A man builds a tower and climbs it and looks down and says, I have made something grand. But it is cold at the top and the windows are clean and empty. A man builds a table and sits and waits. And maybe no one comes. Or maybe one person does. And then another. And soon there is talk and coffee and silence that feels like belonging instead of absence.
It is easier to build alone. No one argues about the shape of a tower. You pour the concrete and go. But to build a table, you must ask. You must listen. You must measure. You must make room. And that is the work we avoid, not because it is too hard, but because it is too human.
Still, I think we must do it. We must take down the towers, one stone at a time. Use the bricks for benches. Let the wind come in. Let the birds perch again. Let the people see each other, tired and honest and full of flaws. Let us speak across grainy wood and spill things and laugh and find that we are less alone than we believed.
It is a small thing, a table. But the world turns on small things. Cups passed. Bread broken. Eyes met. And if we are ever to know each other again, it will not be from the top of some great height, but across something humble and flat and shared. It will be across a table.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.