nostalgius

My first morning on the job the only men above age fifty that I spoke to were better groomed than any human I’d ever seen, and I was shocked that I could feel so minute and beholden to them, these complete male strangers. The women were much the same, but they frightened me.

Subjects of this broad customer base – affluent businesspeople flitting in between meetings or before elevating up to their ocean-view offices; inexplicably surgeried my-aged women strolling up with their lips and nails, wanting almond milk mistos only, all of them; all ranges of the vapid and devoid, the distracted and distant, consumed by phone or by self or by the smallness of me in their shadow, the sight of which I know gives some people elitist fortitude of a special, lonely kind – are certainly not representative of everyone I serve in a day. They do arrive on consistent enough a basis, however, to expect to feel the weight of their wonder at some point during the day. Sometimes the burnout comes later in the afternoon, when sanity dictates a break from any activity; other days, you can see the line forming out the door and you know it’s just a deck of teetering dominoes that by the fancy of the wind will tumble each in your direction, where you stand on your mat in your work boots brushing coffee grinds onto your legs.

For a long time I came to see this tidal wave of personality as a power gradient which favoured me least. Most customers treated their daily (read: horribly stagnant and predictable and boring) trips for coffee as a right, an entitlement. Coffee to people like this is as integral a part of their morning as is brushing their teeth: their day does not really begin until that box has been checked. They’re not fit for the world until they’ve been caffeinated. They can’t imagine embarking on their noble quest of vocational contribution until the americano they hold in the paper cup that will be expedited to the landfill has been consumed, diluted by just the right quantity of cream (oat milk, if vegan).

But let’s allow for an interjection of compassion. Paying for coffee is likely the first chore taken place outside the home in the morning; it demarcates separate realms of heavenly privacy and societal obligation, to the economy, to one’s boss, to the sphere of relative influence refracting sun’s light around a body. The cafe is not unlike a demilitarized zone for the proceedings of the day. You are safe to order coffee whether you are in fact wearing a suit and have paid for a hair treatment in the last week and have a car that could pay my rent. But you are also safe if you’re running late, or unemployed, or depressed. If you’re extracting every delayed second from your morning until you absolutely have to be somewhere. If you’re perfectly friendly and interesting. If you really care about the coffee I get paid my own share to make, or if you do not.

I’ve started to think of an inversion in power. I’ve started to recognize the privilege I’ve had as a witness, the access to these surreptitious minutes spent in a line, exchanging money for goods, presenting to the rest of this neighbourly bubble the form you presently inhabit, for better or worse. A barista’s position is static, meaning limited omniscient: we have eyes on the room but the room is itself our bounds. I can only guess at the frequency of your meetings or how much of the water you can spy from your desk. I don’t know why the attitude, some days. I do though see faces returning, on end, and at each encounter I feel the crystallization of some tacit understanding, between me and them, me and you. One that begets some semblance of appreciation for one another. You see me in a dirty white shirt with stained fingernails, stress-sweating off makeup applied well before dawn; I see you in moments of vulnerability before entering into worlds of decision-making, tactic-enacting, cash-printing. I know you’re not here for too long but it’s where you place your foot before the leap. You live on the other side of the ravine and your fields are groomed and verdant new and make me sigh in my own moments of clandestine contemplation. But I’ll stale and expire if I don’t come to terms with the views. I’ll dial in my shots and somehow find solace in the fact that my home’s already built, underfoot, overhead.

My mom is not a hard person, though she is firm in her convictions. She holds beliefs that drive me crazy: her stance on the Anthropocene and her fear of unsanitized kitchen surfaces are two that torment me even kilometres apart. Her falsetto imperatives swim around my head when I’m cleaning or working and I know the exact phrasing she’ll employ to tell me to finish a job. There exists a personal threshold for her mewing and I know that when breached I become hostile towards her, a repercussion I behold shamefully in retrospect but can’t with all my might deny in real time. I absorbed her stubbornness and her fastidiousness in utero; I learned her standards through trial and much error growing up. But for all her many edges she is soft, and she cares, and she is whimsical in ways she may not appreciate consciously.

She is a bird with hollow bones. She rides thermals deftly, as graceful as any other airborne being. Both migratory and nesting, she sweeps great lands to seek her solaces but always she returns to her perch, of which she takes great pride, and for which as a beneficiary I am always grateful. She finds delights in myopic fancies that my sister and I can clock in unison: a bowl of children’s cereal dusted with brown sugar; the first vernal lilac’s bouquet; a golden retriever laying supine on a sidewalk. She is the pastry chef under whom I apprenticed (Anna Olsen, you’re a close second) and the smell of chocolate chip banana muffins on a Saturday morning is one that could arrest my claim at adulthood. At times it is her ceaseless milling that sends me reeling and at others it’s what I spy through windows to admire: always going, hands deceptively quick to assemble dessert for a crowd, shooing crumbs left by others off the floor into the dustpan to make room for the exquisite. She laughs heartily, gutturally, easily. She is not above the genre of teenage stoner comedy. Her attention for others is acute even when unsolicited, and it comes of no surprise when I share with her a scrap of my own life that she has predicted it, whether by tea leaves or yawning skyscapes or dreamstruck lightning.

And this last quality sometimes arrives with consequence, for what child enjoys the truth that their parents have preceded them cognitively in all imaginable ways? What does this mean for sovereignty? How do we unhitch ourselves from the interminable links to our forebears? But more importantly, how will we act when the knowers leave our sides? I think of my mom’s 2H smile lines, the swaying of her head as she accepts information for not the first time. I can’t conceive of all the dawdling notions that must bubble up inside her skull when she considers me, nor the absence of her sobriquets and monogramed idioms from my existence. A forward-facing continuation without her saccharine, scintillant, steely steadiness – a blip she as any mother has weighed and demarcated, furtively, without sharing – is one I may never be ready to engage.

But she will teach me just as she taught me to fold egg whites into batters. Her kindness always seeps through caulked tiles. Here she is in vintage lamplight, a varnished treasure with little drawers and lockets each buttoned up shut before my prying toddler’s mind, and I know just as seasons warm and counters collect dust that I’ll have to find the devices to understand. She is not a hard person; the tiger lily keys will be set into velvet and furs.

Untended coals that carry warmth which invoke fire well into hours of public noise restriction. To my left: a conversation about hallicunogenics; my right: details of a new movie I will never see. Across from me, the most tender and biting discussion of a potential relationship’s tilted, turmoiled, rails. Can’t take for granted the remarkable pops and fizzles that brought us all here, the barbecue behind us in its now-cold stoicism, the homemade cedar table laden with edible heirlooms, the string lights there rightfully so, and the music setting moods on some schedule of repeat. No indication of real specialness and yet.

Ragtag, off-cut, Kintsugi wares. When does lightning strike quite as gently. Illumination that does not blind but exudes as wingbeat shimmers. Denim on all but maybe two of us and fingerprinted cups shared, tipped, upended between each. The pan beneath the coal fire will cool as forecasted rain arrives, as entropy lays claim on all things, as morning peeks out over the fence and whispers hello, are you up, would you like coffee, I made some. Kindly. Anomalies in black sky can’t be appraised and needn’t be, not when here with bug’s eyes we see smallness as entire, as endless and loving on continental scales. But with your cheeks marigold and walnut before the dog days of the fire, please know how long I’ve been looking for disparities like this one, craning my neck up to blue moons in the hopes of being seen in reflected atmosphere. And even now in indisputable silence I feel the value stitched in lace over my brow, and I pay my respects to the forum that holds me in regard, any at all, ever, at any moment, ever.

Get-togethers tend to have their own nuanced ebbing and flowing of interaction, activity, energy, dictated probably mostly by attendants as opposed to actual itinerary. Reliably, I will start strong on social fronts and wane with aggression; by the back half of the night I’m happiest if I’m reclining and sipping on an easy drink and doing far more listening than speaking. This night followed that prescription right to the letter (sub firepit for the typical late-hour centrepiece). I was feeling tired, content, and just cerebral enough to feel the intensity with which the coals in the fire were intent on being personified.

One thing that seemed profound at the time was that this group of people, gathered around the fire at this certain point in the night, lit and filled up a lot of personal, social gauges I have. It’s been a while since I’ve been as involved in a group setting as I am among these friends. I’ve grown very used to silence as a discomfort, as in, saying nothing yet wishing anyone would ask me what I think, re: anything. Believing in the correlation of worth with extraversion and decibel count. Now it’s just nice to be relieved of that weight. Even wordless, still. I don’t perceive my reception as being discoloured or marred by my tendency towards quiet. I may even be appraised and appreciated on that basis. What was once a hinderance and insecurity; now just a birthmark or freckle to be beheld, illustrated, or marked for identification.

We’re just a small number of people building relationships and striding forward but there’s so much to be taken with soft thankfulness. I don’t think we’re necessarily special but it feels that way when I think of my life and the sum of friendships within it. These nights are good for us and I look forward to more, and more.