#coffee bean
(Story ten. This one I can relate with. It’s about wanderlust and coffee. What else? To anyone who’s reading or has read any of my stories, thank you so much! Enjoy)
Money has been tight pretty much all her life. That’s the truth. I don’t think she’s ever been ashamed of it.
Regretful?
Of course. She’s in her twenties. All she wants to do is travel and read. She actually does that. But up to the point where it doesn’t get with other needs, like you know, eating, paying rent, utilities.
So, not much to be honest.
When she wakes up for work, there’s the dreamers lightness in her head and the heaviness of reality in her chest. She’s been working ever since she was seventeen.
It was the one term she had agreed up with her parents so they could let her study a university: she’d have to get a job and support herself financially as much as possible.
Now, she’s working at that indie coffee place, at the corner. She’s a barista there. It fills her in a way that, which many couldn’t imagine it, considering a meaningless job.
Well, it’s not like she’s a life-saving doctor or a big-money litigator but, who is?
One thing that she really loves about her job?
She can stay up late, even at that mystical hour when the rest of the city seems to be sleeping, holding her book and sitting all snuggled up, in her tiny balcony and be sure that next morning when she wakes up, she’ll just brew herself a cup of the strongest blend and roll with it.
Coffee and books. It’s a natural perfect combination.
Like chocolate and orange slices. Or chocolate… more chocolate?
She usually works the early-morning shift or the late-night one. To many people around her, she looks like a person who likes to shut herself from the crowd. That there, in whatever few customers show up just to pick their coffee or have some cut for their house, it’s her true comfort zone.
They’re wrong.
There’s some childlike pleasure to be the first one to have your fingers tripping the lights witch and grin as you see the light bulbs make the place come alive, with lukewarm orange light.
In her mind, it’s like the sun and the flowers. She does enjoy preparing the espresso machines and checking for what is there to be stocked and come with the delivery truck.
But her biggest secret? The reason why she’s always after that early or late shift? It’s because the world comes to her and saturates her with its essence.
Whenever she has to receive a truck with the coffee beans of the day or the sacks of tea for the shop, she takes a moment to herself.
She opens up the sacks and draws breaths voluminous enough that make her head spin. She breathes in Chile and touches part of Bolivia.
If bliss had a taste it would be that one, right there. Flakes of wanderlust reach down to her and she takes all that she can, while in her mind, there are instant replays of everything she’s read about these places.
After that? It’s back to work once more. There’s that pep in her step, a beat to her walk that anyone experienced could tell you that she’s daydreaming of stelliferous shards.
There are customers coming in; all kinds of. Some are uni students like her. Others are family people, or workers or whatever possible one can think of dropping by a coffee store for drinking something or getting some coffee cut for home.
She’s seen it all. She keeps seeing it.
That’s the other thing she loves about her work. Over the years working there, she’s developed a saying: ‘If it’s weird, it’ll find its way to the coffee store. And it doesn’t, then someone will be gossiping about it in the coffee store.’
She lives in a big city. But still in there, it’s like she’s back at that little village whence she originated. Plus, there are still some people who come and maybe talk with her about a small travel they’ve been to, or some opinion for a trip she may have suggested she wanted to go.
In these four walls of brimming colors and tasteful decorations, she feels that she has a house where the world comes rushing in every second. Thinking that she has found one big, really big and usually caffeine-primed family makes her smile.
Because nobody wants to shut up after they had a sip of her coffee.
At the end of her shift, she turns in her apron, changes in the back and takes her sweet time to go back to her flat. It’s half an hour walk and even though her legs might be throbbing, she rarely takes a bus or the metro.
It’s a recollection for her, that time. It’s her stuff, rehearing in her head, everything that’s been told about trips, about the world, or some weird incident someone had. It’s what keeps her little vessel wanting to go, whenever there is that stillness on the ocean waters. A stillness that most people would dissuade most people, but she’s different.
She wants to travel and read. Where other might feel shivers because nothing is moving, she is going to take it as a sign to go. To keep going That everything is smooth and the world holds her break, to give her a break.
And look at the stars for her way.
Once she reaches her apartment, she heads straight for that little jar she keeps under her bed and tucks in what bills and coins she can spare. They’re tips, the money she saves from drinking her coffee at her workplace, paying late some stuff or reading some books online.
The amount she’s gathered until now brings a weary smile. Like that she sleeps, smiling like a fool, dreaming of the world that she was at her fingertips, hoping to see the world of her books and mixing it all together in something so superior, that makes her tear, without knowing it or ever realizing it, while she sleeps.
After hard work, she manages to take that long-craved trip she cares about. She flies there, she has the full experience and she feels that beat that the earth carries crackling through her and revivifying her. She feels reborn, with so much knowledge.
For her, that’s what resurrection feels like; being brought back to life by the wonders there are out there.
Upon her return, she goes diving in the pages of poetry and fiction that now quench her thirst for new stars that she might not see. It makes her dance with tipsy, jittery limbs; what she has succeeded until now.
Once more, she braces herself and after sailing to the open world, it’s time for her to receive that world.
With a warm cup of espresso, behind her counter.
