Eating lunch by yourself isn’t a tragedy. It’s a table with no one to perform for.

A meal alone gets read as a public sign that something is wrong, mostly because you assume everyone else is reading it that way, and they are not. What it actually offers is forty minutes with nobody to manage: no conversation to keep alive, no expression to hold. That is rest, even though it rarely gets called that.

If you end up alone at lunch this week, treat it as time rather than as a gap. Eat properly, look out a window, let your attention go where it likes. If you would rather have company, ask somebody directly another day, which is a separate question from this one.