Café Thing

When I entered the café I saw that all the tables were taken accept for one. Then I noticed that the table I thought was free was actually attached to another table, which two people were sitting at. As I was standing there wondering what I should do, a waitress came up to me and greeted me. She was very friendly and asked me where I would like to sit. Now, feeling a little bit of pressure, the choice was clear: next to those two people.

I initially sat at the chair facing the window, but it was too bright so I switched to the other side of the table and sat on the bench facing the café. The two people sitting at the table seemed friendly, which made me feel at ease. All I really wanted to do was chill out and maybe drink an espresso, but when the waitress asked me what I’d be having, I told her a latte and a croissant. I didn’t really want the croissant but I ordered it because I felt as though just ordering a latte in such a nice cafe was not enough. The waitress asked me if I would like jelly or butter with my croissant and in that moment I thought, Eww, who actually orders butter with their croissant? I told her just the croissant would be fine, though after I said that I thought maybe I would like some jelly too but said nothing because I felt the moment had passed.

I took out my laptop. Earlier in the day I had been at another café where I tried to write something but couldn’t because my eyes kept shutting out of tiredness. But now I felt I had more energy. I had finally taken care of an important errand at a governmental office and that made me feel good, and the walk to the café from the office had been very pleasant. I had taken a side street and something about walking on this quieter street in the sun and cold reinvigorated me.

I began to write and I felt as though the writing was going well. I mean, it was a slow process, what I was working on was coming along slow, but it was coming along. At one point I overheard something that my seat mates were saying. The man sitting diagonally from me was saying to the woman across from him, “I never get any emails that are real emails these days. The only emails I get are advertisements.” This comment made me think to myself, Is this what people talk about? I mean, I talk about such stuff too, but is this what people talk about?

I carried on with my writing. At some point, my tablemates paid the bill and left. I now had the whole table to myself but by this point didn’t care because the man and the woman had been pleasant. After a few minutes, a young woman came into the café. She must have been in her 20s. She stood near the center of the café, not far from the entrance, and, I noticed, was in the same predicament I had been. There were no seats. Or rather, it seemed like there were no seats. There were actually three free seats by me, and after she looked around the café for a second or two, she came over to the table I was sitting at and asked if she could sit with me. I said of course. It was so cute, because she had been as timid as I was only 25 minutes earlier when I had come up to the table to sit next to those two people.

I went back to writing. I was writing a fiction story. Sometimes when I write, I think the piece that I’m writing is total crap; other times, I might think that the very same piece is great and has much potential. My state of mind was that the piece I was writing had potential. When I noticed that I only had one hour before my next appointment started, I asked the waitress if I could pay. The bill was 5.80 euros. I thought that that was expensive, but I told the waitress that I would like to give her 7 euros in total. One euro and twenty cents felt like a good tip, and when you pay five euros and eighty cents for a coffee and a croissant, it is good, I guess, it’s about 20 percent, but now looking back, it doesn’t seem that great.