It had been a night of the senses.

We ate at a restaurant where vision didn’t exist. Completely pitch black and a blind man brought us our food. Therefore the flavour of the canned smoked salmon mystery plate was extremely rosé, the water was far colder than usual, and the bread acted like a same poled magnet to the butter on the knife. We ate like cavemen with class, hunched over our plates without each other knowing our snakelike posture, eating $30 meals of lavishness while picking our noses and chewing with our mouths open. If the darkness is is supposed to heighten the other senses, then my sense of humour must have doubled since, and my sense of taste must have tripled, because I thought those tiny escargot balls were mini wontons.

We watched an opera in the German language. A german lady melodically screaming at me about the severed head of John the Baptist. A somewhat sexualized version of John the Baptist’s beheading. After a meal of darkness, the visual stimulation of theatrical lights and exaggerated costumes exploded in the eyes of the blind. I heard tones that I never thought I would. My sense of culture was heightened tenfold through this display, translating subtitles from the original German into the French and into the English. Salome just wanted someone to love. My sense of empathy was lost when she killed the man she wanted to kiss. Like purposefully pouring a litre of milk on the ground and crying about it while you lap it up on your hands and knees. Maybe I don’t understand true love. Or maybe I just don’t understand the opera. Yet.

The walk to the metro, the metro to the house, the visual pollution of the city invaded my space, and my antiestablishment sense started acting up, so I closed my eyes and thought about eating in the dark some more.

Everyone has their own personal sixth sense. Dead people, weather prediction, gambling knowledge, horse whispering, shopping for sales, etc. My sixth sense had been throbbing all night long. The sense located in between two pieces of leather, usually in the pocket on one’s backside. My sense of frugality, likely inherited from my father, throbbed like an open wound throughout the evening. Paying for the entire evening, I can’t imagine what his was doing.