I sit in coffee shops a lot. Not to hear chatter from people with far superior social skills than me. Not to actually drink coffee (I mean, I do, but it’s more or less a ticket to do work). I sit in them to write, to emulate the heteronormative white men I grew up idolizing (and still do, problematic as it is). I write in coffee shops to more or less fit into a trope. That is, the tortured white male with too much time to think about how things don’t really matter.

I mean, I’m self aware enough to know that I’m not that tortured. I’m no Van Gogh, no Cobain or Ian Curtis. I’m not anywhere near as talented or recklessly ambitious, as they were. Besides, I’m a shitty writer, not a gifted musician or heavenly painter.

But I digress. The point here is when I sit in those coffee shops trying my best to write the best, cleanest sentence I can, I see other people. Other people with lives and hopes and ambitions that lie completely outside my perceptions of them. They work, they fall in love, they get their dreams smashed by the mallet of reality that chips away their souls. I’m exaggerating, but the point remains: they live outside of my head, outside of my thoughts.

It’s a strange phenomenon, really. There’s a word,

sonder, that pretty much sums it up. Wondering about the lives of people you’ll never meet, how their existence moves day to day. I feel it probably too much, but it does make it easier to withhold judgement. I mean, it would, if I wasn’t a judgmental asshole. Even so, however, once the judgement is gone, all that remains is the questions of where are they going? Who are they? I have no idea, really.