The Sensuous Bean

Bollo's

I go to a particular coffee shop a street away from my apartment. It isn’t perfect. Not the perfect replica of the one I have spent the last 20 years trying to replace, but, it’s good enough. I feel a sense of belonging there. Silly, I know to find a sense of belonging in a $3 cup of coffee delivered to me in a tiny chit of a chat to make room for the other paying customers behind me. But it’s enough. Enough to feel warm within. Enough to call me back to every morning. Enough to find solace within, and comfort around. 

Gillies.

Most days it's just that. A large cup of black coffee; strong, dark, bold, intoxicating. I breathe it in. That first hello. Steam from its surface filling my foggy head with wakeful inspiration for the days needful wanting. 

Today, standing in line, I thought I saw her. She is always near. I can always feel her around me. But she has never appeared to me in human form until today. Today she was working far behind the counter in the small staff area half hidden from the line I waited in. Today she was there, standing back toward me, hair down, filling the monster coffee grinders just out of my view. And just for a second, the briefest of seconds, I saw her. I knew as my heart overrode my heads sensibilities that this was her. Her hair was long, straight, just past the shoulders, as it always was, with the tinge of silver her box color couldn’t confiscate. She was standing tall.  Taller than she had been in the last few years when the weight of the painful burden of her bodies betrayal had permitted her. Today she was 50 again. Time had slipped two and a half decades. Oddly, or poetically, this is the same morning our clocks had been pushed forward an hour. She worked quietly. I could only see a part of her from the back. Just enough to tell my heart that she was still among us. She had decided to hide in a coffee shop. She must have known I would settle upon this one. It’s deep, sensuous allure calling me in. The cry of a baby to its mom. It’s how we just sense the other needs us. 

Sensuous Bean

I know she turned around at some point. I know she did, but there was no face my mind could correct itself into seeing. Just the back of her. When it was her. The rest I don't need, and, so, I let her stay. 

No, I countered. It's not her. She never wore black. And yet between the coffee and the crowd I was content and comforted to just know she's near.

I spent the best part of 12 years sitting here studying.
Bollo's. My corner