starbucks

I was pacing around my room after another day spent doing nothing of value. I’d done what I could to distract myself from my lack of purpose; cut my hair, watched some TV, ate a few extra meals. But it was one of those days that, for whatever reason, I felt guilty about being a human slug. After spacing out for a few more hours in front of the monitor, I decided to find a coffee shop and finally burn through a few pages of a book I’d been neglecting to read, with the usual flimsy reasoning of “I won’t be distracted if I get out of the house!” With limited options available at the time, I settled on a Starbucks.

I regretted the decision immediately upon walking in. It was a little too bright, too crowded and energetic for 9pm. Not at all the sultry coffee shop atmosphere I’d had in mind. But I was already there and had nothing better to do so I ordered a tea and found a seat outside the throng. I felt self-conscious at first, too exposed and alone, but after a few minutes my irrational bout of anxiety passed and I settled into reading.

I kept catching myself thinking how extremely long the book was, how I wasn’t particularly enjoying it but not hating it either, and how I didn’t have a real reason to read it in the first place (other than it being a piece of “essential literature” that I felt I should experience for the sake of intellectual growth or whatever.) I thought about how it would end up going back to the library unfinished like so many before it. Then I noticed that there was really a significant number of young people around me with Macbooks and wondered why so many proud, 20-something Apple enthusiasts seemed to be Starbucks regulars. It started a jaded ringing in my head so I grabbed my coat and put my headphones in, feeling a bit of tired dissatisfaction at my half-assed attempt to expand my literary horizons.

I decided to have a smoke before heading back. There were some people huddled under the awning outside so I settled for standing a few meters over where I’d be exposed to the falling snow, but alone.

I put my headphones in and lit a cigarette, leaning back against the wall as a song I’d downloaded earlier that day started to play. I looked ahead and watched the snow falling softly under the light of a lamp post. There was no wind, no sound reaching me but the music, no movement in my view but the cigarette rising with my hand and the smoke billowing out from between my lips.

I suddenly realized how beautiful this moment was. The stillness, the music, the solitude, and the smoke. For a while I just stood there appreciating it, taking in the steady snowfall and feeling thankful that it wasn’t windy out so I could enjoy it comfortably. I decided that I didn’t regret coming here after all.

I considered taking a photo but a grainy picture wouldn’t do it justice; it would be pointless to even try. I wondered why I even felt like taking one in the first place, why these fleeting moments of picturesque beauty seemed so important that they had to be captured and preserved for future reference, and why I and so many others were desperately trying to seize these moments and hold onto them long after they’d passed.

It’s usually futile; it’s rare to take a quick shot that manages to capture not only the scene, but a fragment of ourselves at the time, which is often what we really want to remember and share anyways. Trying to find the right filters that will take others beyond the surface to reveal a glimpse of our thoughts and feelings at the times they were taken, before settling and posting them with the rest. Trying to drag these moments out because in the backs of our minds we know that, without warning, they’ll pass and we’ll go back to our regular day to day, and to the emptiness we felt before them.

After a few minutes I was no longer taking notice of the quiet scene before me but instead reveling in my own loneliness and isolation. Concluding that, despite my vague attempts, nobody would ever really know me, whatever that meant. I think I even felt a kind of satisfaction from the thought. It was all quickly extinguished, however, by that familiar hollow echoing in my head telling me that it didn’t matter one little bit. It was just another tired bit of mental masturbation serving to keep me content and away from despair while I continued going nowhere. I stamped out the cigarette and headed back home.