It was not far away. like just around the corner.
When I turned around, I saw this lady in a black jersey turtleneck sweatshirt, biting off a seemingly delicious cheesecake one mouthy. She stared at me, with a despicable stern, as if I had penetrated her privacy with my attempt to distinguish where this distinct smell had originated from. It was an awkward and uncomfortable moment yet triggered my curiosity over how others would react to the others around them towards specific actions.
Then I realized, it was just a cup of stale coffee, hiding pleasantly at the corner of the bookshelf.
“Right, you are at a cafe.”, I had to remind myself.
It was a pretty cozy cafe, sitting at the corner of a crossroad that was pounded with tourists and locals in the center of Beijing. You looked up, finding yourself gazing at a couple of sketches or architectural plans. Then you turned your head, you saw this line up of greens accompanied by an industrial looking bar that extended vertically to the other corner. On the opposite side of, there was a floor to ceiling window where I used to sit every Saturday afternoon around 2 p.m.
I used to like going there at 2 p.m. every Saturday. I would sit on one of those stools and dangle my legs as if I had been back in Venice in an early spring day when I had been resting on the ormeggio, watching the flow of the Canal Grande, appreciating the serenity of that moment.
I would stare out of the window, observing the passers-by, trying to figure out what they did, where they came from and where they were going.
Would they return? Were they happy? Were they falling in love with someone that did not love them back? Did they have financial problems? Did they have fun at work? So many of these questions would pop up in my head and quickly faded away as this somebody paced out of sight. I would just be sitting there, sipping my coffee and looking at the remains of the emptiness, asking the same question when the next target appeared. Sometimes I would question the validity of why somebody like me would be procrastinating in a way that many others could easily stunned by.
Yes, me. Somebody like me.
I am not trying to make myself a sacred or holy figure that is out of this world for its purity and sanity. Quite the opposite, I am me and I was me. I have never changed throughout all these years, after all this have happened. I probably just hid myself in a nutshell that had constantly endured the cracking from the outside.
Someone would come to me and asked me if I were interested in some strange instant detergent which could help to remove the stains on my white sneakers. They were normally in their early twenties or late teens, telling me that they were working part time for this product that was still under experiment and needed market attention. I would listen to them, and they would go on selling me this product, even if I showed absolutely no interest. The conversation did not always end well. Sometimes I would bicker about them invading my privacy by trying to force to me buy these nonsensical stuff that did not scientifically prove to work. Sometimes they would go as far as to beg me to buy just one piece so that they would meet the sales target of the day.
“I don’t need these detergent for my shoes”, I remember myself saying, “my sneakers are not even pure white. They are off-white and ivory.”
I probably reasoned too much.
I would turn to the first page of my notebook. And I would try to convince myself of writing something down so that I would not lose track of things when things got tricky or complicated. However, that was never the case. I could gaze at the blank sheet of paper and do nothing, lost in thoughts of maybes or maybe-nots. Those were the thoughts of nothingness. It was probably the reminisce of the “good old times” when I was such a juvenile, fun and care-free character. Or maybe, just maybe, it was a spontaneous response to all the mess that I made.
Yet one might question, you are barely in your thirties, how much mess could you have made? Then I would have to dive into the same old conversation of not judging one by his/her cover.
Sometimes I am amazed at how much a word, a sentence, a clause or a paragraph could emote or it could not. As I am sitting here, right now, right here, in this cozy little cafe, typing down these words, that had not had any meaning until I started to learn English. Or does it actually mean anything at all? One could keep asking oneself the question again and again self-consciously, in doubt. And there may never be an answer.
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