Coffeehouse Distractions

I thought this place could be my Hotel Chelsea. A center for creation and culture. Mount Pleasant’s New York. But I find myself distracted from what I thought I came here to do, which was to clear my mind. Even as I leave the worries of work and classes behind like trash on the curb, I keep endlessly running words, phrases through my head. I can’t even give my undivided attention to Patti Smith and her beautiful memoirs. Life has me at a pivotal breaking point and, as I write, there’s a girl who precociously bumps the table with her chair and is driving me insane.

Kaya is at least a hotbed for individuals who I find entertaining in between Patti’s words of youth and artistry. I look up and I see them. The environmentalists with cornrows and layers of tights and denom. The intellectuals with their collared shirts and wafts of espresso. The underclassmen on an awkward first date. And the frazzled hipsters, outraged by some world or campus event.

While here, I think of Egypt and the spread of revolutionary grumblings on social networks. I think of my single status and how in words I’d describe it. I occasionally stop writing and look about the coffee shop. It’s warmly lit, and it pleasantly contrasts with its earth-colored walls and ceiling covered by woven coffee sacks.

I look up at a crick in my neck and see a familiar face from where I sit in my shadowy corner. It’s the president of College Democrats standing in line at the cashier. He’s exhibiting the same goatee and black pea coat for which I know him. And for a moment, I think he meets my gaze before I lower my head to continue on with Patti. The tales of Robert Mapplethorpe keep my attention a while. Then as I return from a bathroom break, a voice interrupts my stern stride back to my corner.

“Hi,” a guy’s voice breaks.

I turn abruptly and see a casually dressed guy sitting on a couch opposite a brunette — a coffee table between them.

“Whoa! That was a double-take,” the brunette says. I examine the guy’s face a moment. It’s agreeable and free of expression. A light-brown stubble borders his mouth. I recognize him — from high school.

“Dan,” I exclaim, “how are you?”

“Fine! How’s the paper? You whipping them into shape?”

I swallow. “Sort of.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” he says.

“It’s a lot of work. Time-consuming. It’s all right.”

I knew Dan from working on the high school paper together four years prior. Amid my third year at CMU, he’d messaged me on Facebook to ask how to get into the campus paper. I was a news editor then and I’d given him some measly description, and I wrote it off with no communication after. He never filled out an application, though.

At Kaya, he briefly told me about his major in the IT department and his work with the schematics in the Health Professions Building. I returned to Patti as if disinterested, but I eavesdropped on his words that followed.

“You know her from the high school paper?” his companion asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “For me, it was just a thing. But she …” He paused. “She took it really far.”

I smiled to myself, realizing that someone had kept up inadvertently with my college journalism career. It was weird. Like all my hard work somehow mattered in a way other than just the obvious. There at Kaya, though alone in a corner, I felt seen. Endowed even.

In the couple hours to follow, I periodically watched those come and go who replaced Dan on the couch. I continued to think about him. He’d been wearing a shirt for some fraternity I couldn’t remember. I’d never had high opinions of people in Greek Life. I figured his intentions, however, with being a frat guy mirrored mine for joining CM Life. We both found a place of obligation where we would inevitably converse and make friends.

I kept repeating his words. “She took it really far.”

Our paths seemed weirdly joined, though they never crossed. I thought about the conversation he’d had with that brunette. He had told her about his friends who were musicians. Dan seemed the type to come to Kaya for the association (while I came for creative solace). He told the brunette about helping his musician friends with their work.

With him gone, I wondered if he was in IT to get into the music industry as if it were only with those technical, production skills that he could. I admired him for the notion. Eventually, though, thoughts of Dan evaporated, and the typical Wednesday night crowd flooded in to hear struggling college artists strum acoustic covers and read poems. Kaya was my place to think and escape. And I liked acoustic music. From that countertop in my corner, I let the ballads of my peers move me.