Coffee Shop Shorts

the sort of thing you write, still wearing your scarf, in a coffee shop to sound vaguely bohemian. Written anywhere but coffee shops.

It’s early morning, strobe lights on a window gaping holes in the trees outside, making my skin yellow against the chipped black of my painted nails. I can hear snatched conversations all around me, someone’s shouting about Absinthe and a song they heard last night. To my left I hear paper rustling, a pen scribbling hearts and swirls; on my right, pages turning, eyes following old long-since-unwritten words. I keep noticing little things like the graffiti in the desk. Graffiti has always fascinated me (legacies in biro-and-compass etchings on a cheap faux-wood desk) and Beth, apparently, woz ere.

- - -

sun rising over the mountains and a castle standing on a hill, birds flying like ‘v’s across a landscape of peaked imagination. Inside the castle all is darkness, but there are no shadows (because where there is total blackness there is no room for shadow) and abysses of what might just be hope (or not). Maybe bliss and despair are closer than we thought.

- - -

paradise an old bus at seven o’clock on a Friday night, friends and laughter, not at but with; we have modified our own food processes with too much takeaway food and tomorrow we’ll feel the ill effects but tonight there are no ill effects in paradise.

- - -

Tuesday night, ten to eight, a small-town takeaway, three of us with clutched-tight money and the fourth waiting outside under the yellow drone of streetlamp light. We walk out eventually, moonshine and grease. Across the street a drunk throws up noisily, announces it to the world. We shake our heads, turn away. Bloody Tuesdays.

- - -

Moments are important. One moment, one glare of light giving antagonists halos, can change the world. The quiet buzz of bins emptying outside, the gentle breeze ghosting through the room, a half-tune pen-tapped somewhere far away, the light making almost-patterns on the floor. A moment is once-here-gone-forever in smiles and tears and maybe-happiness.