It is Saturday morning at duck-rabbit, the coffee shop up the street from my house.
The tunes of Yussef Dayes play in the background, the subtle bustle of folks come and go, and I sit here in this small, sunny space and write. I jot down a couple of lists: a weekly to-do, meal plan and grocery shop, and home chores. The lists somehow turn into a rambling reflection on the Russian attacks on Ukraine. The political digression evolves into a writing exercise in which I use as much alliteration, assonance, consonance as I can to describe the last person to walk in and talk to the barista.
In between the bullet points, war angst, and daisy chaining sounds together, I occasionally take a pause from writing and look up and around to gather my thoughts.
I notice a guy sitting a few tables away.
I realize he and I are both kind of dressed the same: we wear khaki chino pants, five panel hats, and clear framed glasses.
He and I both have a coffee mug on a saucer and a glass of water on our tables.
He, too, is writing.
He and I both have well-worn, black leather soft cover notebooks and write in pens with our left hands.
In this small, sunny space, it feels as if he and I are not all that different.
During a few of my pause and look around breaks, we make eye contact.
I wonder if he too is occasionally looking up and around to gather his thoughts.
I wonder what he writes about. I wonder if he scribbles down the same sort of things as I do: his list of chores to work on when he gets home, some personal thoughts about the Ukraine and Russia conflict, a poetic exercise using literary tactics to describe the last person who stood at the counter to order a coffee.
I wonder if he is writing about me as I write about him.
I realize how, in this small, sunny space, we are more the same than we are different.
And I wonder if this small, sunny space makes him realize that too.
The only difference I see is that, as I sit at a table facing the street, he sits in the window seat facing me.
I lift my pen from the imprint made on the page while forming the dot of the period in the previous sentence, and as I take another pause from writing to look up and around to gather my thoughts, he stands and slings his bag over his shoulder. He passes me with a slight smile and nod and busses his mug.
As I watch him walk out of the coffee shop and close the door behind him, I realize that it is raining outside.
I stay here in this small, sunny space and take another sip of my latte.
I wonder if he had a latte too. Or was it a cappuccino?
