Haymarket Cafe

There are so many ways in which we grow up and become our most authentic selves. In a cafe in a winter storm, I sipped a black coffee with a book of poetry and decided this is where, and who, I wanted to be.

Perhaps it was Sylvia Plath who perfected the art of “I am”, but when I look back on this particular storm in a dark New England winter month, I sense a profound and moving moment of self-realization.

Perhaps, also, it was predictable that an impressionable young college student would be in love with the ambiance associated with cafe life. I watched the professors come in and order a latte, grading stacks of paper. Students packed the cafe during the day and spoke of traveling abroad and ending world hunger. I hunched over my novel and daydreamed. I wondered if I, too, could make friends one day and be someone who cured AIDS.

They served hot tea in small ceramic kettles with the tea perfectly packed into a satchel. I took selfies downstairs, in sepia. Rehab was mostly boring and I had hours to burn before my dad left work and could drive me home. I look back at these selfies and see a puffy, young face. This is not who I wanted to be.

It is not who I want to remember. Eighteen found me in a psychiatric institution, just days after ordering what I had hoped would be my last sip of coffee. My father, telling me if I couldn’t finish college, I needed to get a job. I wondered about the young college students discussing politics over coffee and had yet no idea what I could make of myself in this life.

The storm outside the cafe that winter strikes a particular chord with me, and I trace the outline of my memories there with a delicate remorse. I am sad I cannot go back to that time, no matter how devastating it was. I am sad that I was sad then, but also sad that I had an innocence there that I will never have again.

One day, I will return. I’m what you might call “successful” now and, a decade later, am craving what the California sunshine can’t provide me. I want snow to envelop my beloved cafe, and more importantly, I want to be inside it. I want to feel warm when there is cold outside.

I want to once again send my sister a Snapchat and make the caption, “it’s stormy here.”

It was, and it is. But now I’ve grown up and know that my heart will always pump black coffee through my veins. It all takes place in the same place I grew up, inside a cafe with a brick facade with fine white detail on the windowsills.