The Café

She has this inability to stay in the library and that’s why she always goes out for a cup of coffee. A Café is where you get coffee. In French the coffee place and coffee is even the same word. Here you go again, says a voice in her head. She always throws those random facts to people when least expected. If you like coffee so much, why don't you become a barista? Asks the voice again. But the thing is as much as she is addicted to caffeine, she has no taste for coffee whatsoever. She always goes for the same order and the waiter starts to recognize her after a couple of times he starts ordering for her. She doesn’t mind. She never says no. She’s not in a café essentially for coffee anyway. She’s there to sit by the window and watch, maybe sometimes also being watched. In Berlin the glass window of a café tends to be huge. She likes the idea that even though she stays indoors she’s also part of the street. And sometimes people come to her and make weird faces. Drunk teenagers or funny young men. Sometimes she smiles back because she thinks it’s actually someone she knows since she’s terrible in terms of recognizing faces. But more often she feels awkward and hides her face behind the laptop. She might be voyeuristic but it’s another story being the object that’s being watched or maybe ridiculed.

She doesn’t come to a café; rather, she comes to The Café. The Café plays unobtrusive music and people there are quite. They don’t talk about far fetching business plans like people in Starbucks. People in The Café often come alone and she likes to imagine them to be artists. A melancholy writer, plausibly a junkie freshly out of rehab with a broken heart. She likes assigning stories to people. The Café is her menagerie with her being one of the performing animals. A menagerie that can be observed through a gigantic glass window. She’s part of them but at the same time she’s not part of them. But she knows she likes it. She likes The Café. She likes assigning stories to people she never met before and probably will never meet again. She is the flaneur who loses her street and willingly stays confined to The Café. She may not be a writer but she is a perfect reader. She likes The Café, the menagerie, and the stories.