It was supposed to be just one of those ordinary evenings—four people sitting over a kitchen island, consuming a meal in silence while under the harsh, watchful glare of the white lights above. They move through the motions individually, robotically, as if on autopilot, scooping up grains of rice with their chopsticks. The scene would resemble a family, an average one at that, with two parents and two kids, if not for the obvious lack of comfortable emotional familiarity charging the air. You’d think it's not exactly family then, more so, “family-adjacent”. As you see bowls of rice emptying and a pot of soup being drained, you can’t help but wonder where the excitement is supposed to be. After all, you must have started here for a reason.

“Innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent?”

There it is. A beat drop. Forget the socially-lacking family-adjacent meal, it’s probably not a usual topic of conversation for your average evening family dinner either. But the father asks this as if it’s normal, as if this is the dominating debate at the forefront of every twelve year old’s mind, and with the deep, inquisitive tone he uses, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he does truly believe his two pre-adolescent kids would have some serious thoughts about it. 

“Sorry, what did you say?” a light voice asks after a moment. You can’t exactly tell if it’s said with an inkling of genuine curiosity, or general impassiveness to the question. It’s a voice that sounds all too familiar, yet at the same time not at all. 

“Do you think that people should be assumed innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven otherwise?”

That response barely gives anymore context, but for the little twelve year old who asked, that apparently was all she needed, given her immediate entering into what resembled a deep, contemplative state, as if she was seriously considering the question. Or at least as deep and contemplative as a child can get. Next to her, the little boy, her brother, possesses a more typical reaction of plain confusion. Their mother across the table, next to her father, still seems too preoccupied in her own world to pay attention to the new developments in the dinner time dynamics.

“Maybe guilty until proven innocent, because I think it’s better to be safe than sorry.” The tone is innocent, and definitely does not match the morally complicated words that were just spewed across the table. The father chuckles a bit in response, although surely he must realize that his daughter may just have possibly condemned the death of potentially innocent lives, but you can’t help but wonder what in the world he was supposed to say anyway. Apparently he doesn’t know either, because after this the silence returns, and everyone continues to eat dinner together, but not really. 

Now if this was a TV show, you’d see this is where the out-of-place lively music starts playing as the camera slowly pans out from the table. As the scene fades to darkness, you realize they didn’t answer a very important question, ”why were they eating dinner in the kitchen in the first place, do they not have a dining table?” But before you can ponder for too long, the silence from the ending of the episode is filled with the jingle for the start of a new one. As the screen comes alive with color and sound once again, you notice the familiarity of the scene, but not without its oddities. 

Once again, the family is gathered around having a meal, but the harsh, watchful glare of the lights before have been replaced by a soft, warmish glow. Taking the place of the kitchen island is a long wooden table, around which four people sit on each of the different sides. The kids sit across from each other, separated by the line-of-sight of their parents in between.  It seems a little absurd to be honest, trying to complete the intimate activity of sharing a meal over a three meter chasm of dining table, the bridge of food across the distance doing very little in its role in bridging the unbridgeable gap.

“You are a minor, you don’t have the right to decide.” A voice fills the stilted silence. Across the jury bench of dinner, a head turns up annoyingly, followed by an obvious eye roll. This conversation is sounding all too familiar, and if anything, lacking interest. “We take legal responsibility for you, so remember your place.”

Was that harsh? You can’t really decide. All you know is, there are somehow no more words to be said after this point, the silence a begrudgingly accepted resolution to whatever just happened. Occasionally, eyes dart up, a brother and a sister glancing at each other, unsure and uncomfortable, but unwilling to disrupt the tense reality. 

Now you may also now be wondering what kind of parent-child relationship would involve formal reference to parental responsibilities, legally speaking, but that is what happens when a lawyer’s work-life balance becomes more work-work harmony. Every home discussion starts resembling those comically inaccurate legal drama courtroom battles, where somehow only three lines need to be said to close the entire case. Every personal conversation somehow evokes the magic power of legal thinking. If this is your job, you’d think that’s natural, but if you are a minor whose exposure to the “real-world” has been, for lack of better wording, no more than a “minor amount”, it does prove a significant obstacle in developing any healthy, emotionally connected, relationship with the ones who are legally responsible for you.

Again, if this was a TV show, maybe some unnecessarily intense music would start playing; a comical contrast to the action-lacking motions of eating so far away from each other. You’ve probably now reached the point where watching makes you feel a little bit lethargic, emotionally ambiguous, and are ready to move on to the next new thing.

It does seem quite a shame to stop in the middle of an episode, in something so unfinished, but that may just be some intentional poetic commentary representative of the incomplete nature of the relationship witnessed here; parents and their children and the unabridged chasm in between. Or even better, it’s reflective of the way all conversations seem to just dwindle in the end, the lack of response either from boredom, or from the inability to carry out extended dialogue. 

You reach out to click the pause button. The image of the family freezes over a half-eaten meal, mid-lack of discourse. As you stare at the screen, examining their bowed heads with maybe just a tad of a wistful expression, you can’t decide if you miss it; that state of distance, always gathered around the same space within a void. Perhaps then, it’s from the disappointing reality of realizing you know nothing beyond impersonal legal formalities that makes you content with ending here.