The waiter looks at me with the cheese grater in his hand, he starts twisting the handle, making milk confetti shoot out of the bottom of the contraption like old faithful in the summertime. The server asks me to say the word  “when” when I feel like I’ve had enough.

Looking down, I think about how like the cheese, I am a snail grinding into the earth; spending my life away at petty work, only to achieve my end goal of being nothing more than a trail of slime and a worn down shell; my ground beef mess of a body pointing the way in which I was traveling.

What shape would reveal itself, if I were looking at my trail from a higher ground? A circle? A line? Perhaps from above, my path is so thin, that it blurs from existence at further distances.

I look back up expecting to see the waiter. He is gone. My salad is cheesed.