There are some places you can never go back to: a childhood home, your last summer as a teenage girl. I waited all summer for a coming-of-age moment, some big new shiny revelation that would usher me into adulthood, sweaty-faced and out of breath.
This summer was full of change. My parents filed divorce papers, my mom started apartment hunting down the coast, 1,255 miles away. My best friend moved into the city instead of living a 15-minute drive. I saw my sister come and go in between blinks, faster than I could catch it. I never had enough time.
I started working at a coffee shop. Messing up customers’ orders and burning my hand on the espresso machine, tattering my arm with marks that would fade, only to be replaced with a fresh one the next day. One day I was joking around with my manager and said something along the lines of what a terrible employee I was and that I was probably just a “personality hire.” He laughed and did not correct me. Humbling, to say the least.
While working at this coffee shop, I would pass the time romanticizing our regulars. Regulars like John*. In this cafe, he was a king. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. He was such a pillar at this place that he even had a little name tag on the seat he would occupy.
I found regulars of my own. Like the man who would come in and order a steaming hot Americano with exactly six ice cubes. Exactly. I would count them out every single time – no matter if we were in a rush, or if the cafe was dead slow. One, two, three, four, fix, six.
As someone who has never lived in the same place for very long, the idea of being a regular was the most endearing thing in the world. I fantasized about walking into a place and them knowing what I wanted before I even asked. I have never stayed anywhere long enough to be known.
In a hot summer of tumultuous change and adjustment, consistency came in the form of my favorite customer. A 12-ounce drip. He would come in and every time I would look at the new book he was reading and try to figure out if there was a pattern lying around as he jumped from topic to topic. Kung Fu, microbes, the biography of Albert Einstein’s friend, a murder mystery (which he thought was subpar), and a fantasy book. There wasn’t a method to the madness. In the end, when I scoured three different bookstores to try to find the perfect book to get him, I ended up with a biography of one of the astronauts I heard one of my old professors talk about – a complete shot in the dark.
I spent the whole summer learning people’s names, as if enough people knew me there was less of a chance I could be erased from this place’s history. I know change is inevitable but I don’t know when I started to be so fearful of it.
Stability has been something that has evaded me my whole life. I used to want to be this big writer with this big life. Brilliant and funny and renowned, flying to new places, staying on people’s couches, never allowing myself to be pinned down. Lately, however, I’ve been feeling weighed down by this inconsistency. My daydreams have shifted into a house to come to, sitting down on a green couch to watch my favorite show every Thursday, knowing what I’m going to eat for dinner, and having a coffee shop a ten-minute walk that knows my order. I think working at the coffee shop showed me a life to envy. I have avoided any way someone could truly know me my whole life. That doesn’t mean I have ever stopped craving it.
There’s a quote by Andrés Cerpa that has never left me, “When I imagine myself, I am always leaving.
I couldn’t draw my own face if god asked.”
*names have been changed to protect privacy