Before there were cities, there were fires. And before fires, the circle. Our circle is now the table, the bar, the counter, sometimes simply a parking lot and a pack of beers.
This signal is lost among the noise, awash in a sea of ease, comfort, fast, casual; necessity of sustenance becomes bound by constraints of time. But the concept remains, hidden internally like primitive instinct, as something buried deeper than speech.
We return to the circle to invent, and to remember. To recall what the body knew before it was given a name. That hunger is not simply for food, nor thirst for drink. That to serve and to be served is to enter a pact older than the bloodlines that carried us here.
There are nights when this antediluvian pattern is briefly revealed: heat rising from the plate, condensation on the glass, a murmur of voices like the wind through reeds. Flames wisp upward and illuminate our modern visage; a single glass of water lights the world.
From a time long before nostalgia, this is recurrence of our collective past. The table awaits.