On a fine cool morning, you go to your favorite coffee shop. Specks of dust float in the spring air. You sit on the familiar leather cushion, awaiting the iced latte that is always on your mind. When it arrives, there is a youthful spring in your heart. You take a sip, the day strolls on. The sunlight from the many windows lands throughout the airy room and turns it into a bath of afternoon gold.
Why do I go to my favorite coffee shop? Sometimes there are friends to meet, schoolwork that needs to get done, tests to study for, meetings with coworkers outside of the gray-carpeted office, a Saturday morning date. And sometimes I go there by myself, book or laptop in hand, to find some time in which I just read or lounge, your typical introvert in need of a recharge. The time in which I most frequented my favorite cafe was during my master’s program — a time when one research paper would require hours of reading other research papers, so many re-edits, so much head-pounding-against-a-wall when I couldn’t string together four sentences (kind of like right now?). I am very sensitive to my environment so when it was time for intense concentration and little distraction, I drove those twenty minutes to the little glass house I got to call my favorite place in town. Upon opening the door I would find others just like me with their heads bent over laptops or notebooks, and it never failed to make me feel like I could do anything I set my mind to. I remember one especially early spring morning, I was sitting with my go-to iced white chocolate latte and gazing at the rising sun, at its full golden light covering the glass house windows like a blanket. I had never seen honey-colored sunlight before, and in all my subsequent visits have never captured it again. But knowing I got to witness it amongst the sounds of the music playing overhead and the barista preparing coffee behind the counter is something I will never forget. Absolute bliss.
