Dear Tiffany,
You are at a coffee shop! You are writing! You are writing slowly, and you keep getting distracted by the internets, but you’re at a coffee shop to write! It’s been months.
Here is one thing that I love about you, Tiffany.
When you were 18, you went to the Starbucks on Centre, just before the bridge, every week to write. You did that for a year. You worked through The Artist’s Way, and The Path, and How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci, and you went every week to write – sometimes working through exercises in your self-improvement books, most times just to journal. The Year of Hazelnut Lattes (known in other contexts as The Year of Independence, but right now we’re in the coffee shop and it was a solid year of hazelnut lattes).
You discovered a love of writing in public spaces.
And you have lost, misplaced, temporarily abandoned, fractured, dismissed, grown out of, and moved away from so many of the things that marked that year. You’ve still got a camera but when was the last time you took it out, for serious? And you haven’t had a dog since Tasha died, Tasha who arrived in that year. And you don’t do any kind of needlework anymore. And you were just saying to a friend the other day about how you used to go out to eat at fancy restaurants by yourself, but you don’t do that either. You don’t volunteer at the Humane Society and you don’t live with your parents, and you aren’t single, and you haven’t had a hazelnut latte in… gods. Over a decade. I mean, there are many differences between then and now. And some things you’ll pick up again, I’m sure. The camera, probably. The needlework, maybe not. The hazelnut lattes… nah.
But this love of writing in coffee shops has been a constant through the last 18 years of your life. You have been writing in coffee shops for half your life. In paper notebooks (spiral bound, hardcover, 6×8 notebooks back then, Moleskines for a long time, and an eclectic assortment now), and on devices (the Palm Pilot with the folding keyboard back then, and various laptops and tablets since). Almost two decades of words spilled out onto coffee shop tables.
I love that strong and sparkling thread through your life.
I’m glad that you’re here now, tonight.
I appreciate the ongoingness of Tiffany-Writing-in-Coffee-Shops.
Come back soon.
Love,
Me
#tenderyear #100loveletters #dailypractices
