The Woman at the Pay Phone

The coffee shop clears out fast after eight-thirty. By nine, maybe nine-fifteen, it's down to a few people on laptops and a couple of older men who seem to come here the way other people go to the gym, not for the coffee, just for the routine of the place. I had an hour to kill and I was running on about five hours of sleep, which is its own specific kind of awake: functional, but thin.

I wasn't trying to eavesdrop on anything. I was mostly staring out the window and waiting for caffeine to do something useful. But there was a woman on the pay phone outside, the one bolted to the brick wall on the corner of the building, and she wasn't talking to anyone yet. She was practicing. I could see her lips moving, and she'd stop, reset, start again. Same sentence, I think, four times at least. Then she hung up without ever dialing, stood there for a second, and came inside and ordered a small coffee and sat down and looked completely ordinary.

The mug was the only thing doing its job this morning.

I thought about it for the rest of the hour. I don't know what the sentence was. I don't know if she was rehearsing something hard or something that just felt hard in that particular moment, standing outside in the cold in October. But there was something so familiar about it, the way she kept resetting, trying to get it right before she had to actually say it to a real person, that I wrote three lines about it in the little notebook I carry and then closed it because I didn't want to overexplain it to myself.

Leaving with more questions than I arrived with, as usual.

It's been a few weeks since I've written anything here that didn't feel heavy. This was just a coffee shop. Just a woman outside. Just one of those small things that sit behind your eyes for the rest of the day and you're not entirely sure why. I think I needed something like that, small, and not mine, and a little bit mysterious, more than I realized.