Falling In Love In A Coffee Shop

**Wrote this some months ago, never posted it, and just now realized that for the first time since starting this blog I haven't posted in not just one but like three months. Not cool. So here, it's Fiction Wednesday! Also, hopefully I'll be posting a lot more in the near future, especially with break coming up. Forgive me- I've been giving tumblr all my attention.**


We're sitting drinking coffee. That's a romantic thing to say but we're not actually drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast. But we're in the coffee shop, as if we're drinking coffee, almost as if we're on a date you and me. That sounds romantic too. Like that Landon Pigg song, Falling in Love in a Coffee Shop. I want all of my first loves, my first falls, to take place in this coffee shop, over the strains of The Civil Wars or Elliott Smith. I want your eyes meeting mine with The xx playing, want my heart beating faster in time with PJ Harvey, want Cat Power to stir in your belly and the whispers of Bon Iver or Jason Mraz to make your hand creep toward mine almost unconsciously, almost out of your own control.

But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.

This is an interview, by the way. I write for the newspaper, you're a musician, and somehow God planted a seed in the head of my editor and for once she did something brilliant and assigned me to write an article about you.

You tell me you think that you're talking too much and I smile. I don't tell you that I'm asking too many questions, questions I don't need to ask you, questions that aren't relevant to this interview at all. I just can't help myself; the opportunity to explore you has been thrust at me, demanded of me really. I'm only human, you know. What kind of individual would I be if I passed this up?

The interview lasts longer than it should and I stare at your eyes longer than I should and you are so full of passion when you talk that I wonder how the other conversations full of inantities and trivialities, like finding the "one" and frustrations at work can even continue in the wake of your words. Your words are so powerful, you are giving a speech, what do any of these other people have any business doing talking while you're talking. How can they not be swept away just as much as I am? Their caucus laughter, the sound of their obscene ringtones, their overzealous laughter, I find vaguely infuriating.

Shut up. I am trying to fall in love in a coffee shop.

But we're not falling in love in a coffee shop, are we, we're not even drinking coffee because you're in a hurry and I'm on a caffeine fast.

My precious half hour with you is up now and I give you the dismissal to leave. But you pause a few moments, asking me about class, how do I like the book we're reading, what do I think of the professor; his teaching style is really relaxed, we're all slacking off quite a bit, which feels guilty but it doesn't matter much because he doesn't seem to care. He'd really be better off sticking to writing to poetry than teaching, you say, and I smile because you don't even know how many times I have said that before, to people who don't understand, not the way you do.

And then finally, you stand up, you're leaving, you're so tall, you're so lovely, don't leave me. You're in a hurry, I knew that from the start, you have to go to work now. But if you stayed, if you stayed behind and talked with me, maybe we could fall in love in a coffee shop.

You walk out of the door and I take a sip of my tea: chamomile, I don't like the Italian brand but it's all that this coffee shop has and the chamomile was necessary to calm my stomach.

I turn around and see long chestnut hair, ruddy cheeks, a head bent over intensively to text books. I know this girl. I've seen her before. All last year, she was on your arm, and she wore dresses and the two of you smiled and ate fruit together. She was your love and now she has seen us, here, and perhaps she thinks we are falling in love in a coffee shop, and perhaps she feels pain, perhaps she feels jealousy, perhaps she doesn't care but she must, I can't see how she couldn't.

I feel overwhelmed for her. I feel sad.

I wonder what it was like for her, when you sat her down and told her things couldn't keep on this way.

I wonder what it was like for her the first time you held her hand or the first time she knew that she was the only person dancing around in your head.

I wonder if the two of you fell in love in a coffeeshop.

I feel an intruder, and I want to hug her and give her some of my tea but I can't. I can't because I like you and she's a girl and so she can tell by the way that I laughed at your jokes and tried to meet your eyes as often as I could and clung to your words like they were diamond and gold and pearls, jewels dropping from your perfectly-formed lips.

And so, we can never be friends, her and I, and that's sad and I sigh. We can never be friends. Because of the coffee shop and how this is the place where people fall in love.