Coffee Runs

When I was a kid, I had a near perfect childhood. I had friends on the same street as me, and we rode our bikes around the neighborhood playing cops and robbers. But, time went on and the black and white shades of childhood slipped between my hands and brushed across my cheek, blurring past.

See, the thing people fail to warn you about nostalgia, is the harrowing loneliness that sinks into your bones. And I am no stranger to this nostalgic loneliness. 

When I was in fifth grade, my family moved cities, I started a new school and those beautiful friends I had dissipated and became the dust settled atop the photograph of my childhood. I began to understand the quiet of being alone, better than I understood even myself. 

To survive my desolate early teenage years, I taught myself how to love loneliness, and I went out to get coffee. 

Here’s my advice, on how to teach yourself to adore alone time: take the longer route to get there. Open your eyes and look around, pay attention to the people around you, the systematic way society moves might seem repetitive and surface level, but when you truly open your eyes to your surroundings it's so glaringly obvious that everyone has a life outside your own, and that’s a lot of interesting stories happening right around you.

A coffee run, to me, became the way I focused my alone time. I gripped it in my fists and dared it to sadden me. Try your best loneliness, overtake me, but it couldn’t. Where I once was desperate for a connection, to fill the void of being alone, I ended up discovering a new mindset. To get coffee, was to force myself to overcome my fear of being alone. It was taking on a mundane activity, in order to remind myself that there are other things outside my life. I’m stepping outside myself for a moment, and breathing. I discovered that being alone didn’t have to equate to loneliness. And of course, rewarding myself with a treat after the fact. 

Waiting for my coffee, I’m not impatient when it takes long. In fact, most days, I hope they are busy. (Most days). In a corner while I wait, with the deep and rich smell of espresso in my nose, I watch. A group of friends sit on armchairs by the fireplace. A woman and man sit across from each other at a table for two. I wonder how their dates are going; is it the first?

People beside me collectively grouped into the same space and same time are living the same experience I am at this particular moment. I think: life might be less lonely than people say it is. 

With more practice, and more time, I developed an understanding of myself. I learned that I like being alone, free of putting on a face for someone else, free to really immerse myself in my thoughts, free to engage with my own personality. I became my closest companion. 

That sounds depressing, I know, and there were days when I would sit in my room and wish for friends, wish to go back to cops and robbers on the street. But in the fast-paced way life moved by, there was a part of me, the part of me cultivated by observant coffee runs, that knew everyone felt alone, in some degree or another. 

Take, for example, the barista at the register. She’s sweet, and kind, and she smiles while listening to my order. I’m fully aware that she’s putting on a face, it’s her job of course, a facade to create good spirited customer service. But I also know, that it takes a certain kind of person, a certain kind of strength even to just pretend. In that, we are together, in that we know the same things. But then she compliments my shirt, and maybe the line between reality and pretend is more blurred than we assume it is. Maybe there’s a chance that as lonely as society is, we, people, strive for individual connection, so are we really alone? 

I’m no longer experienced in the childhood game of cops and robbers, nor do I often ride my bike with a group of friends through my neighborhood, but, here I am now watching movies I love, thrifting, spending time with my thoughts and enjoying it. Here I am now, and I’m not so alone. I have me, and I enjoy me, and I have 8 billion other people in the world that, at some point in their life, have likely lived a memory parallel to mine. Also, I’ve got coffee in my hand, and the barista at the register who shares her smiles with me. 

There once was a part of me, that was hurt every time I recognized the dusty whisper of nostalgia, because with it came that cold loneliness. That part of me now knows that to feel nostalgic is to also feel gratitude and peace. That part of me knows that taking the beauty of those past moments, and applying it to the present, is the real purpose of nostalgia. 

We come from different places, and we’re moving forward towards a completely different journey, but for a minute or two, my life and the lives of complete strangers are the same: waiting in line to grab a coffee. And that is as far from being alone as I can get. It certainly invites peace, and calm into my life, even if my life appears to be “lonelier” than most.