Who knew why it always happened like this. Friday. My day off. I headed to Workshop Coffee with the intention of getting some writing done but of course, a pretty girl was sitting at one of the tables. I noticed her the moment I walked in, ignored the waiter who’d pointed to a table at the corner of the room and opted for one closer to the girl. Taking a seat, I put my bag down, took my laptop out from its case and placed it on the table. Writing, writing, gotta do some writing. Picking up the menu, I flipped through various coffee options: a Panama Volcan V60 pour over, a Barista’s Collection Clarified Espresso, a Radar Farm Aeropress immersion. I didn’t realise, when I left my house earlier, that Workshop Coffee was a sci-fi Disneyland related to all things Arabica and Robusta.
“An iced latte please,” I said to the waitress who’d come to take my order.
“One iced latte,” she repeated. She looked like she could be in middle school, wore a brown apron over a black t-shirt like the rest of the staff on the floor. The ones making the coffee in what resembled an open-air science lab in the middle of the room wore dark blue aprons. I figured they were older, maybe high school.
She left, I sat there. Sunlight cast a golden fan over my laptop, from the corner of my right eye I could make out the girl. She had black hair down to her shoulders, wore a black top tucked loosely into a pair of washed blue jeans. Black sneakers. Red handbag propped up on the counter beside an iced matcha latte topped with a swirl of whipped cream.
It always happened like this. All I was trying to do was get some writing done—some writing, some writing—but now there was a girl and I couldn’t think of much else besides whether I should man up and say something. This had happened before. Was this God’s way of telling me not to work? That there were better things to mull over besides how to mop up the soup of words in my head? Opening my laptop, I scrolled to the next page of the novel I was working on. It was about a girl (of course it was), and here I was thinking about another girl. She’d turned slightly so her back faced me, one leg crossed over the other as she scrolled through her phone—write, Liam, write!—glancing back at my computer, I skimmed through the last chapter. I didn’t understand what I’d tried to say which made me even less sure about what to add next. My fingers, hovering above the keyboard as if worried of an electric shock at first contact, remained hovering. Closing my laptop, I got up, asked a waiter where the bathroom was. He pointed outside. Passing by the girl who remained sitting there, oblivious of my thoughts, I headed for the bathroom.
Locking the door behind me, I turned on the faucet and splashed water on my hair and face, stared in the mirror for a few seconds as water dripped from my chin into the sink.
Just talk to her, Liam. The longer you think about talking to her the more you’re not going to talk to her. You know this. You’ve been here before, you’ve learned that you’ve just got to go up and talk to her. Whenever you let it wait for too long it never happens. That’s why you’ve got to do it as soon as you have the thought. Just ask her if she speaks English—No, no, no need to say that—Just speak English and if she knows she knows. If she doesn’t? Well, at least you talked to her. Ask her where she’s from, what her name is, or why not just start with hello? Why are you always trying to overcomplicate these things? Hello—Yeah. Hello.
Leaving the bathroom fixing my hair, I wiped my palms on my jeans before heading back inside. There she was. Of course she was there—Why wouldn’t she be there? I walked right by and sat back down on my chair, took out a pair of headphones and opened my laptop. Music. Something to drown out the noise. I was writing a chapter about going to the beach with the girl who was the protagonist of my next novel, so I found an hour long YouTube video playing ocean sounds. Typing a few words, I paused, deleted them, looked out the window at a line of cars waiting at a traffic light, heard the lapping waves in my ears and felt the sun’s warmth through the glass, a warmth as light as a butterfly and yet so full that when I closed my eyes I could convince myself that I was lying on the white sand of some far-away island.
My iced latte arrived and I’d never seen anything like it. Half the cup was filled with something I could only describe as a cross between whipped cream and foam. Mixing it with the espresso shot at the bottom of the glass, the white whipped foam slowly turned beige. I had a sip. Not bad. Returning my focus to my laptop, I typed a few more words, sat back and repeated them to myself, and by sitting back once more saw the girl to my right. She was still on her phone, flicking through the screen with the long painted nail of her index finger. The waves lapped in my ear. Apart from the table next to mine, most of the seats were filled. Older foreigners working, younger Vietnamese taking pictures of each other, of the place itself. The baristas in the middle of the room kept making orders: one guy had a pony tail, poured hot water onto a coffee filter and I watched as the water dripped into an empty pot. With the waves lapping in my ear, the longer I watched the water drip the more I got the impression I was underwater. Here I was, submerged in a cafe in Atlantis, enjoying a Friday afternoon while sunlight broke through the surface above to shift along the ocean floor—Write, Liam, write. The girl’s still there. You got some time. Just write—Another sentence. An okay sentence. Today wouldn’t be one of those days where the sentences flowed. Today they would take some pulling out, some grease, some soap, as if the sentences were a ring stuck on a stubby finger and I had to get it off somehow.
One of the waiters dropped a glass. Even though I had my headphones on I could still hear the shriek of the glass when it struck the floor—shattered—and the way everyone’s heads snapped to find the source of the noise. The girl looked too. Phone still in hand, she remained seated but looked over her shoulder, twisting to watch as the waiter who dropped the glass apologised and a team of other waiters assembled to clean up the mess. The shattering cut through the waves, cut from the ocean’s surface and through its liquid weight to where I was, submerged in the deep blue. Instinctively I removed my headphones and came up for air, returning to land, returning to Workshop Coffee.
The girl ended up leaving not long after. I watched her pay, cursing myself about how I’d known this would happen. You had to say something immediately. You couldn’t wait for some magic moment—C’mon, Liam, you knew this. You knew this and you let it wait anyways, didn’t you? For some reason I at least expected her to look back when she pulled open the door to leave, even the quickest glance to show some recognition that she’d known what I’d been thinking all along, but of course she just left. Just left.
With the girl gone, I put my headphones back on and resumed listening to the ocean waves. I got some writing done, and when I wasn’t writing I looked out the window at the cars and motorbikes coming and going on the street, tourists walking on the sidewalk and pausing every few seconds to gather their bearings. The sun hadn’t let up once, and leaning against the windowpane the heat was like a warm hand pressed against the back of my neck. The waves continued lapping in my ears. Before I left I checked my phone, thinking about what to do next.
