Venti

The barista is young, the shop is old. Where the shop has seen thirty six summers, she's seen no more than half...and she saw them with clear vision, where the shop had to squint because the lighting was kept dim and the curtains kept thick. But maybe she was squinting, too. It's hard to tell. We can't assume simplicity is always partnered with youth. The lines of her face aren't nearly as easy to read as that of the book the older woman at the corner table uses to shield her face from the steam of her double strong venti espresso. The woman hasn't touched the thing; if she were at all thirsty in the first place the book has quenched it. Shes older than the shop, but when you compare the shop to almost anyone other than the barista, it too, is rather young. The woman's a decade younger than being twice its senior. It is easy to imagine what this woman looked like when she was as old, and even younger, as the shop; her face thinner, her skin firmer, her eyes brighter, her hair smoother. She was pretty once, that much is evident. If you look closely, you can see past the cobwebs that have knit across the laugh lines around her eyes. You can see that she once knew how to smile and mean it. But back to the barista. She was young, when her story and mine stumbled upon the same fork in the road and decided to travel the rest of the way together, for a while. We followed those roads and didn't care where we ended up. I'd come to the shop for reasons unimportant. I don't remember the logistics. There wasn't coffee in my apartment. That much is for certain. I was twenty. There was nothing in my apartment. “A little dim in here, wouldn't you say?” I said as I flipped through my wallet to the aproned body at the counter, in vague expectation that whoever it was would be listening. “It's all part of the ambiance.” Said whoever it was. A womans voice, and you could hear the roll of her eyes and the careless shrug of her shoulders in the soft diction of her words. So I looked up from the wrinkled bills I was hopelessly trying to iron out with my fists. “Trendy.” “Very trendy.” She wasn't smiling. I stared at her and tried to see her, but it was impossible. Her right eye brow flicked with sarcasm, her bottom lip jutted ever so slightly, her dark hair braided into a green baseball cap. I couldn't see her, not really. “Can I get you anything?” And it bothered me that I didn't understand her. I was a writer; this was before I stopped labeling myself as this or that. I was writer and I wrote people because I knew how to read them. She was the antagonist in the story of my writing career. I didn't know what her story was or how to tell it. “I'd say you're holding up the line, but there hasn't been a line in this place for the last quarter century, so, regardless, can I get you anything?” “I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Uh. I don't know. What do you have here?” “Well it's a coffee shop.” “Got that much. It's missing the big menu that's supposed to look like a chalkboard, but too clean to be realistic. It's absence really takes away from the 'ambiance.'” “Just use your imagination, I guess.” She said the word as if she'd bought it and then forgot about it and was digging it up long after it'd spoiled and was trying it out for taste. Her tone was dry and ironic, but something in the way her eyes flitted impatiently around the room, despite the raised right brow, told me that she; where she was, what she was doing, what she was thinking, was anything but ironic. She had reasons. She had priorities. She had dreams. But she distrusted the believed weakness of imagination to tell her what exactly those dreams were. “My imagination is wondering why you work here.” “Excuse you?” “Come on, it's dark in here. Literally, dark. Lifeless.” The woman in the corner table, the only witness to the incline that lead our roads to their initial fork, turned the page in her book, the rustling of paper the only noise aside from the cappuccino brewer and the muddled sounds of the barista's thoughts that only the most pretentious of writers, as I was, claim they can hear. “But you don't know me.” She was looking at me now, her brows had settled. Her face still cemented and closed. The writer I was at this point in our stories wanted to open the doors of her, crash them open, and allow the whole of her to tumble through. I thought that if the doors would unlock, she'd all come out, just fall into me, and I'd understand everything there was to understand. But people, unlike stories, don't always work that way. Once a writer begins to understand this he is no longer able to call himself a writer and be proud of the title. “You're right. Would you let me get to know you?” “Probably not.” “Sad. Why?” “My boss has this thing about people coming in here and not buying anything.” “Okay. Two espressos.” “What size?” “I don't know, grande.” “We're out of grande cups.” “How does a place with two customers a day run out of cups?” “I can give you a venti.” “The hell is a venti?” “Haven't you been to Starbucks? It's very trendy, you'd like it.” “Are there venti's at Starbucks?” “Venti is the largest sized coffee.” “Who decided that?” “Starbucks.” “Trendy.” “Very trendy.” She rolled her eyes as she poured espresso into two large cups. I watched her, and tried to detect the inkling of a smile anywhere on her face. Any dusting of a grin, anything. But if there was anything, she had put it there herself. She'd mastered the art of composure. “Who's going to drink this one?” She asked as I took one of the cups. “You, obviously.” “I hate espresso.” “You work in a coffee shop.” “Like I said, you don't know anything about me. We're what they call 'strangers.'” “Didn't anyone ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” At the front of the store, a man entered wearing the same green apron as the barista, and her eyes lit up. “My shifts over.” She snatched the espresso, removed her cap, untied her apron, and came out from behind the counter. “Enjoy your espresso.” She said, humorlessly, as she sauntered out of the dim little shop. At this point in our story, our roads had angled towards each other but had not yet met. We'd reached a fork within a fork. So we stalled in our tracks. I glanced at the woman in the back. Her eyes were wilted, and the tips of her fingers touched her lips. She studied the words on the page with an intensity I hadn't matched, and I was a writer, and matching that imminent passion of the written word had been named my calling, and in this moment I understood that there somehow must be a little bit more to me than what I sat before the typewriter. And there must be a little more to the dark haired girl behind the coffee counter who didn't drink espresso. But because I was human and incapable of understanding even a glimmer of what life might have been if I were not, in fact, myself, I strayed from the idea of my own ignorance. That's what we do. We go into coffee shops and flirt with baristas and think the lives and thoughts of others are observable, tangible entities, and in the back of the shop, women who don't smile anymore read fictional stories about people who do. And then we leave and let our coffee get cold and there's an empty venti cup on the counter with no tips in it but one: Brighten this place up a bit. It'd improve the ambiance. ~~~~ The barista haunted me for the next several months, our paths leaning towards meeting, flirting with each other but never crossing over. Always preparing to fork but switching directions at the last second. I was twenty and I was always out of coffee. I was always out of coffee, and there was a girl at the coffee shop, the only girl, the only person I'd ever been incapable of reading, the only person so I thought. So I lead myself to her tirelessly. After three months of venti espressos that she never drank, she let me order her something she actually wanted; a plain black coffee with a single sprinkle of cinnamon. Venti. “I don't know why you keep coming here.” She said, leaning in a fatigue I didn't understand across the counter, her eyes closed. “Nothing special here.” “Eh, you're right.” I said. “Nothing special.” I watched for anything in her face; chagrin, a grin, a scowl, anything. But there was nothing. “Do you know her story?” I asked quietly, nodding towards the woman with the book at the corner table. Every night I'd come here, the stage had been set the same: young enigmatic barista with braid and green cap working the counter, slightly wrinkled, lanky college guy staring at her with a ferocity that only writers would understand, and middle aged woman reading intently in the back corner with espresso that she would not drink steaming in front of her. Empty tip cup. Drawn brown curtains. The humming of the brewer. “Yes.” she said. “You do? What's her name?” “That's not really part of her story.” “Hmm. And what would her story be?” “You're the writer. You tell me.” “She's divorced and reliving a lifetime ago when things were happening how she'd planned for them to happen.” “Hmm, creative. Not quite.” “She's actually a spy and the books a camera.” “obviously the only option.” “She's watching me.” “You running from the law?” “Robbed a bank.” “Ah.” She was still lying across the counter, half asleep. Her face hadn't changed as she'd spoken. And suddenly I realized she was right. I didn't know her, and I didn't know the lady with the book, and I'd been fooling myself into believing that people were clay I could mold into whatever I needed them to be, whenever I needed them to be it. But people aren't clay, they're rocks. And it was blind of me to believe I could bend them to whatever shape I felt made sense. Sometimes people don't make sense. Sometimes you have to realize that. ~~~ A year later she had a name and she was no longer known to me as The Barista. She had a name that I knew and whispered to her and I had one that she could say, too. Our roads had met. Here came the fork. She was lying with her head on my chest, quiet. I still could not read her. The words on her pages were still foreign. And I spent the entire walk of our road trying to learn her language. “I'm scared.” She said, and this was the first time that she had prefaced a statement with the word “I” and followed it with vocabulary that would at all assist in my deductions of her puzzled persona. “What are you scared of?” I kissed her forehead. “I'm scared of becoming the woman at the corner table.” And then she fell asleep. That was the end of the conversation. Me left awake and my mind left writing a story I hadn't the words for and she dreaming dreams of things I'd never know and she'd never tell me. And in this moment, I was scared, too. I was scared because it was my senior year of college, and my professor had asked us to finish the year with an evaluation of the human nature, as a writer saw it. He said that to understand storytelling is to understand people, to understand life, and I'd lived my entire life thinking I'd trained myself to understand effortlessly. I'd mastered the fickle art of people listlessly. It made sense. It all made sense, everyone made sense, everything made sense, all I had to do now was write it. But then I'd ran out of coffee. And there was a girl with an empty tip cup. And I realized now that I didn't know what she'd been saving the tip money for. Was she trying to pay for a car, or an apartment, or school bills, or a pet parakeet, I didn't know what she wanted, physically, or emotionally, or anything regardless. I understood that she had positioned the telescope of herself towards a star, but I didn't know what that star was or if I'd ever be able to reach it. So she slept on my chest, this stranger who had a name and an empty venti cup with coins. And our roads forked, but after meeting briefly I stalled in my tracks, and she went forwards to the left and I went, eventually, staggering off to the right. There is no understanding of people, or of life. So I stopped calling myself a writer. I left her sleeping in my apartment and went to the coffee shop. ~ ~ “Hello, I hope I'm not bothering you. Can I talk to you for a moment?” The woman slowly drew the book from her face and blinked. “Yes, yes, I don't mind. What would you like?” The cobwebs over her laugh lines were thick, and I swept them away. I knew her face, but I didn't know where I'd seen it or when. “I've just noticed that you came in here with that book everyday and was curious. I'm sorry if I'm intruding.” The woman's eyebrow flicked upwards ever so slightly. Her right eyebrow. “I could tell you the same, you know.” She said without infliction. “What book are you reading?” I ventured, and she stared at me wordlessly before putting the book down before me. “Um...this...” I leafed through page upon page of handwritten text. The name of the shop on several pages. The name of the barista. My name. I looked at the woman with cobwebs on her laugh lines. “You haven't written about today yet.” “I can only work so fast.” “Tell me about your smile.” “It hides a lot.” “How come I can tell it didn't used to hide, but I never knew it, regardless?” “There are reasons people smile. And sometimes those reasons don't stick around.” “You were very very young when you stopped then.” “younger than when you knew me.” “You wrote about us.” “How could I not have?” “What were you saving the tips for?” “If I told you, you'd have lost, sweetheart. You know that.” “But I'm tired of playing.” She kissed my forehead. She took the book. She didn't drink the espresso. “I told you I was scared of this. But I forgive you for not understanding. I could not have expected any more from you or from anyone.” And she left. And she never came back to the corner table, though the barista kept coming to work and I didn't stop her, and I, too, started buying my own coffee. I went home and sat before the typewriter and knew that I didn't know what a story was or how to tell one. So I put the typewriter in a box. And the characters that once whispered in my dreams and the fictional settings that once manifested before my eyes no longer forked their roads in my direction, and when they tried, I steered away from them. That's the human condition, I suppose. That's what I'd tell the professor. Dauntless passion entwined with love we don't understand that forces us to make promises we can't keep that makes us believe things that are not real. Ideas that forge our actions and words, that crumble the ideas of the people you cared about, because you can never know what they were thinking, and you never will, and you cannot pretend otherwise. Thinking you get it when you don't. Thinking you're important when you're not. Thinking one thing, when it's another. There's this thing called ambiance. Sometimes coffee shops have it, but ultimately, people have it, except we call it by different names. And when I look at her ambiance, I wished it were brighter. And I didn't care to look at her and see that she liked it a little dimmer, and accept that. I'm looking through one lens. She's looking through another. I am human. And I am incapable of understanding that our lenses are anything other than identical. So that's our story. It's not exciting, and but its complexity is venti, I guess you could say. Full of things too hot for me to swallow and too large for me to grasp. And this is me trying to write that story, but I don't have the words, so it's not turning out the way I wanted it to, and this is why the typewriter normally stays in its box. ~ ~ “Hey, dad. I brought you a coffee.” It's been thirty two years since I graduated college, and my son is twenty years old. He has no coffee in his apartment. He's twenty, so he has nothing in his apartment. He hands me a large cup, and says: “I met a girl today, but I didn't get a very good look at her. The shop was dark.”