My handwritten delight, being typed up in yet another coffee shop.
It’s an overcast day––no sun, but very humid and warm. I love weather like today. It makes me think of going to the aquarium with my mom as a little girl. I drive down Calhoun, a street I’ve been down about a thousand times. Living in a city very near to where you grew up is a strange, dual existence. You can walk by a corner and remember a family walk when you were twelve or, at the same time, your roommate vomiting up red Gatorade mixed with vodka your freshman year of college.
On Calhoun, I listen to a Louis Armstrong song I’ve never heard before. It somehow matches the weather just right– music is curious in this way. I glance over to Marion Square, and it looks right out of When Harry Met Sally if you squint really hard and romanticize your own life a little.
In a café (babas on cannon, to be specific) I sip a whipped honey espresso (as decadent and pretentious as it sounds) while I write these seemingly random thoughts down. Yet they all go back to this idea of familiarity. The person I’ve begun dating is sitting next to me. He, too, provides me with a deep sense of familiarity despite having known him for only a few months. Our conversations are familiar or, maybe, they’re just right for where I am. I know that a year from now, I’ll have moved away from this city, a close friend of mine, since I have had cognitive thoughts. And while I delight in the opportunity for a new “adventure,” I delight in the comfortable familiarity I feel on this day, in this city, in this weather, in this café.
I sit attempting to get my homework done at the barstool facing the café’s front window. From here, it is easy to be distracted by the other café-ees sitting just on the other side of the glass at the tables lining the sidewalk. A boy, probably about my age, drinks champagne and hits his dab pen all while eating a sandwich and listening to “In Your Arms” (he held his phone up and practically showed me his Spotify while pretending to read Into Thin Air). This rather obviously stoned man has been deeply distracted from his book by two dogs, one firetruck, one urge to draw a mountain in the margin of the text, and six times by the wind blowing the leaves of the tree to his right. Rather than judging him, however, he’s making me laugh. This formulaic, I-didn’t-come-to-this-coffee-shop-to-get-anything-done is a relief on a Wednesday afternoon. Both of us, a pane of glass separating us, are doing a horrific job being productive. This, as far as I’m concerned, bonds us in the strange way all college students become sympathetic friends to one another during finals week. So, I guess that is my final, familiar delight– people in Charleston wasting time together, drinking coffee and pretending we are doing something, anything productive.
No comments yet.