Cafe Studies

It can be found in the girl at the cafe as she raises her oversized cup up past her eyes, the girl with a habit of cutting spirals into the skin of her thigh, seeing to herself nothing but a drain pulling her down but to her future husband something like a whirling galaxy. He’ll be surprised she hid it for so long, but she’ll say you get good at it after a while.

It’s in the crossed, jostling legs that jingle keys but not the reason for the jostling, the sarcoma that’s come back in the breast of his wife, occurring in less than 1 percent of breast cancer cases, but she’s got it.

There will be the barista hiding his trans identity from family and friends, dipping toes in water with adjusted pronouns, the liberal use of binders. Eschewing makeup, then cutting off his long locks, cringing when his family thinks it’s just a phase, one that’ll hopefully be over soon. As if he could just turn it off, delete the dysphoria, go back to being that little girl that you know his parents see, take it all back and become something that didn’t even exist back then. He knew who he was for as long as he could remember.

There’s the elderly woman whose husband fought in Korea and stayed there after the war, taking up with a woman he met and trying to pass off for dead back home, but word travels far, even from the Far East. She tore up the letters, the photos, all of it. She heard he’d just passed. They had a service back home, she was invited. His other woman didn’t go, just yesterday it was. Today she sits in this cafe, ordering a latte, wondering about memory and forgetfulness, about the undying passage of time.

There will be the man with a substance abuse problem, on parole for a DUI when he was ready to stay sober this time, wanted to, but his dealer got back in touch with him. He saw the same old people and cracked, went back to using. He’s wondering what will happen with his visitation rights after this charge, if he’ll be able to watch his boy grow up or will be shut out until he’s eighteen. And then what? Is he even considered a father at that point, or nothing more than a sperm donor? He was going to toss it all out before he was pulled over, give it all up after this one last high, but this high will cost him dearly. He’s waiting for his parole officer to come and relate his fate.

You’ll see the professor waiting for tenure, about to meet with the student he needs to discuss terms with, the professor so-called “happily married,” the student with text messages and pictures that could put him out of a job and marriage. They’ll be discussing terms of class passage, and the student doesn’t even know that he was going to give her an A before the blackmail. Now she might try for more, might collect hush money. This girl used to be the bully of the spiral-cut girl when they were much smaller than they are now, and the spiral-cut girl will consider cutting again when she gets home, replaying memories she buried deep. It was the student’s behavior that drove her to cutting in the first place, the student giving one of those false “Hi!”s now, the cringeworthy ones that are disgusting.

The professor was good friends with the soldier who went to Korea, the two of them growing up together in the cornfields of Indiana, capturing lightning bugs and making fake crop circles with tennis racquets strapped to their shoes.

The trans man will meet the substance abuser in the emergency room, both of them going to psych–the trans man for a dysphoric panic attack, the abuser for detox. They’ll chart their changes and recoveries over lunch, trading hospital food with each other and musing on the people they are, the people they want to become. The substance abuser will get the pronouns wrong at first, but after being told will get them right every time. They will trade numbers before they go.

The elderly woman will end up in the hospital shortly after the service of her once-husband, a pain in her chest that won’t go away. During the routine checkup, it will be discovered that she has cancer. She’ll become a close confidant of a certain woman with sarcoma, keeping her spirits up day after day, making it her life’s mission to cheer this woman and fight alongside her, war buddies they are, even sharing the same uniform of hospital green, bald heads to prove their solidarity.

All of these things will happen, but for now there’s nothing more than people in a cafe, sipping their lattes and trying to forget the passage of time.