coffee house

There’s just something about a coffee house.

There’s just something about the way pen on paper, combined with the aroma of coffee beans and the quiet rumble of background chatter over a few gentle jazz notes, that can make one begin writing about quiet and gentle and rumbly thoughts of internal conscience that wouldn’t normally come forth. Maybe it’s because music and writing and a good coffee just mix so well together, like some sort of immortal combination of literal inspiration that would never cease to motivate. Maybe it’s simply the traditional atmosphere at a place that one can drink coffee. Maybe it’s coffee itself that inspires this atmosphere and in turn inspires the creative mind: the hazy lights, the chatter, a warm concoction of bittersweet dairy in your hands and the agglomeration of well-loved sofas, invitingly squat and always ready to take in a new individual’s weary day of toil.

Maybe it’s also the people that inspires - the ordinary and unremarkable people that waft in and out of the coffee house. The mundane people who possess such remarkable details and these peculiar details have a nasty habit of jumping out at you from within their unremarkable stereotypes: There are always the couples that come to huddle in a secluded corner; the random assortment of coffee drinkers sprawled across the tables with a collection of books, paperwork, technological preoccupations and friends; also without fail are the foreigners, lining up at the counter and squawking loudly to each other in rapid and furious bouts of French or German or some other exotic linguistic twist.

And of course there is the writer, lest we forget. A solitary figure at a small table at the back of the shop, perhaps laptop propped open or perhaps accompanied by a fountain pen and its contents scribbled artistically (but also incomprehensively) over a wad of battered note paper.  An empty coffee cup would be sitting cold and neglected at the edge of the table; the pitiful last dregs of coffee already several hours into the post-mortem state.

For the writer there are so many things to observe in a place like this. So much distraction yet inspiration cruelly intertwined with each other that they will without a doubt find themselves drifting off, staring into space with a vacant expression every few rotations of customers, sometimes unwillingly fixated by the strangers drifting in and out of their line of vision, sometimes positively charmed by the strangers wafting in and out with such style and (assumedly) hidden quirk.