Reclaiming the Cafe, or Keeping the Cafe at Heart's Length

A man has a favorite cafe, often vibrant and entertaining, many friends coming and going, lots of laughs, lots of laughs. No needles, guns or ass- just lots of laughs. He's there almost always, early morning, through the day, late at night. Funny stories, jokes, music, conversation, sometimes fights, sometimes some heated exchanges, but usually, just a grand time. 

In she walks. Of all the cafes in all the world. Of course, she's been there for years also, he just hadn't turned his attention in that direction, in *that way*. Neither had she, toward him. But she sits at his table at a time when he's disconsolate with loss and she's long been unseen, and they start to flirt, and their tiny lit match suddenly catches fire and the blaze is a lot of different blazes. Hearth, spark, wildfire, magma, hand warmer, blood, Hatch chile, hot plams (sic), hot pools, breath, fevered and strange, blue flame and orange flame and all the temperatures in between. He loves her madly (sic) and believes her congruent and reciprocal attestations of same. 

For a long time, the cafe is then mostly about her, for the man. When will she arrive? Ah, here she is, How long will she stay? She says the man is her favorite, then says the man is the love of her life, and they toy with the future, or, maybe, she toys with him using the future, he's not entirely sure. Ha, the impossible future, what a joke. The man gets jealous sometimes, since, a la David Byrne's girlfriend, everyone is in love with her. Who is that she's sitting with? Who is she flirting with? Two days go by and she doesn't show. It's awful, the man knows. It's awful. He usually forgets that she has a whole life outside the cafe, and that every single moment, no matter how radiant and no matter how completely connected, is stolen. Parting hangs over every exchange. Eventually, the entire affair becomes about parting- when it will inevitably happen, for how long, and why. 

Then it gets heavier, he thinks suddenly, but acknowledges that he probably just didn't want to allow the heaviness as it creeped in. She still shows up, the cafe is still  brighter with her there. But she's sad, she's troubled, what started as guilt free and with absolutely zero regrets gets more and more clouded over, more problematic, darker. The fire sputters sometimes. Or there's nothing there at all. Just ice. 

Then the inevitable unfolds. She can't really come to the cafe anymore, life has taken over, choices made long before the man was even remotely part of anything on her trajectory. There are a few brave attempts at the old energy. But it's not possible, there's no oxygen for the fire, there's no lightness left. 

You'd think the man would get up from his regular table and shake it off and leave the cafe. Or he'd reclaim it somehow, since it was originally his space, and the friendships were originally his, and the free-floating banter, and music and jokes and open-ended social time was originally his experience. 

But instead he stays at the table. Every time the bell on the door rings he looks up, or he feels weirdling hope rise when a shadow crosses the light on his table, or he hears a voice similar to her voice or can swear he hears her laugh. A friend of his tells a joke and he looks to see if he can share it with her. The same crowd is there, the same people as before, but somehow he doesn't care much. Every now and then he has an okay time, there's laughs, there's something interesting happening. But he's usually waiting. He's too proud to admit that he's waiting. Looking out toward the front. Every now and then she does return, he sees her across the room, his heart in his throat. But she's true to her word, and even when back, she's gone, she's not going to visit his table, at least not to sit down, she might walk past, she might wave, but she's not able to return, or she doesn't want to, or what seems to be the case is actually the case: she's forgotten, or refuses to remember (are those the same?), it was amazing while it lasted, but you know how these things are. 

Finally though a time comes when the man knows he has to get up and never go back to the cafe. Or at least, he has to accept the fact that the cafe is forever changed, or at least changed for a long time by the dying of the fire. He's fought this realization for months. The cafe was his community, after all, as flawed and disappointing as it could be. So he's fought the realization that it's sick to continue sitting at the table, it's hopeless and futile, and that he had been shifted from the surprising soul mate connection that neither one even believed in to more and more waiting, more and more wondering, more and more ache and the repeated rusty dagger in his heart and the high hopes resulting from the more and more sporadic encounter, for a lot longer than he had been willing to accept. And the gushing attention and admiration he used to get had long changed to more and more distance, and he had settled, and then the distance had changed to a shadow crossing the threshold and a polite wave and maybe a smile, and he had settled, and he had started to take a single flicker to mean there was hope of one of the reliable high-banked blazes of the good old days. If all he could spend his life with was the best flicker ever, well why not?  

Weirdly, after her departure, he began to notice that he hated a lot of things about the cafe itself. He hated the crowds, the flattery, the noise, the encounter with stupid opinions based on stupid shit, the lame attempts at humor that could never match the hilarity he had shared with her. The painful enterprise of posting publicly what he would have messaged.The whole thing had been poisoned by love, and had become mostly grating annoyance and forced jollity and performative nonsense that he had to admit he wished she would see. 

When will he get up and not return? Reclaiming, it turns out, is out of the question. He's decided to venture to new ways of finding community. He's left the cafe, but returns for shorter periods of time, focused on a few things, working on not watching the door, not listening for her laugh, not jumping when he thinks he's seen her hair or hands across the room. Reclamation is impossible, going back doesn't even mean anything, there is absolutely no going back, but reconfiguring the relationship with this old blood space and creating distance from the cafe might be feasible, he thinks. 

So it is with Facebook and good old Percy. Two days ago, the two year anniversary of a remarkable and beautiful day, reminded by the Facebook Memories feature recycling a picture of some Trader Joe's flowers on a hotel desk, in brilliant Santa Fe morning light. The flowers reposted a year ago, with the comment "Deja vu." The sharpest part of the dagger blade being that Percy's absolutely certain he's the only one of the two who recalls. He hates himself for being unilaterally sentimental. He's "working on" self compassion around it. But the harsh judgment of himself is there when this unilateral sentimentality burns him down. The collared shirt (which is ashes in a fire pit now), basil soap, unable to meet the night before, early morning, shy hello at the door, "I like how we didn't immediately start pawing at each other," in person absolutely instantly far better than the already-amazing virtual, the sudden sense of fate and destiny that neither one of us believe in, the mirror, the hands, breath, explicitly bold and tender, sweet and innocent but perfectly frank text, each and every detail like a single thread one could follow, until next time when it seemed like there would always be a breathless tumbling next time. 

It makes it especially painful that he's in Santa Fe for the memory. He's partly reclaimed his town—after all, he lived here nearly 30 years pre, married, divorced, decades of life—but he also is astonished by how much of the town the two covered during their very brief, surreptitious visits. (And he's astonished to think how strange the whole world would be if it were so covered, by these two). 

Gifts, for example, this series of photos that he knew nothing about, nor Flor Garduno

It's definitely been on old Percy's mind, the way the two of them shared humor. I think, truly, we underestimate the power and importance of getting it. I will probably write an entire other meditation on this, but, for Percy, knowing and being known, seeing and being seen, has often resided precisely and inextricably in shared humor. Is there anything more isolating and uncomfortable than having a supposed life partner who simply does not get it, or, even worse, is threatened, appalled or disapproves of it? And how much sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to see the perfect meme that you know another person would get, and the permanent bond of getting it together, and to be unable to share said meme with said person? (That is exactly what Lear originally said, before the edits). 

"In Beckett’s Watt, you’ve got a distinction between three forms of laughter: the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, the hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, but it is the mirthless laugh that is the most interesting, what Beckett calls the “pure laugh,” the risus purus. The mirthless laugh is the highest laugh and it laughs at that which is unhappy. True humor is therapeutic insofar as it allows us to recover from the delusory happiness of ideology into the lucidity of seeing things for what they are. When we see things for what they are—and this is a very philosophical thought and it is the other item that I borrow from Beckett—then we do not laugh, we smile. I end my book on humor with a discussion of smiling, which I see as the final acknowledgment of our humanity. This happens when we look at ourselves from outside ourselves and find ourselves ridiculous. It’s the acknowledgment of one’s ridiculousness in a smile that finally interests me."

-- Simon Critchley, philosopher

And isn't truest love and partnership loving the shared ridiculousness of shared selves the most, and loving all of that above all? Isn't the most sacred the most absurd? The combined crying-laughing, for which one of the two coined the word "craughing." the highest and most wise reaction to what is?

Those things all live in the cafe, though. They are no more. Nor, of course, will they be again—nothing ever is, again. Over and gone. But the cafe itself, that is, Facebook itself, it has to go, at least in the form of being always accessible. Off the phone goes the app. Off go messenger (home of the very cauldron of the crucible), Instagram. Posting to insta from the laptop. 

Another whole range of thoughts about the sharp difference between nostalgia and a happy memory. It feels humiliating somehow to think that it's only a matter of time. Time the preserver, time the destroyer. And yet, fuck, maybe we really are that fickle. Definitely another blog post on the way about the dagger memory versus the happy memory. And how, at different times, they are the same memory. 

Will it work to change the relationship with the cafe? Time will tell. Meanwhile of course there's plenty of blue screen light to be had.