What is it about coffee shops and grocery stores that always makes me feel like I’m five minutes away from falling in love?
Knee jerk reaction is that it’s too many movies. But I don’t feel like I’m about to save a building full of drunk businessmen and women from an angry German terrorist every time I walk into a skyscraper. So I can’t blame the movies for this, either.
Yet every time I stand in line, waiting to order my Grande Hazelnut Cappuccino or for the Barrista to make it, there’s a part of me that just expects that this is that moment that me and one of the girls sitting in the corner reading her book on Plato or the one trying to decide between the soup-bowl-sized coffee mug purchase or the “Best of Ray Charles” cd to go with her non-fat latte order, will look back on years later as the seemingly mundane and ordinary activity that sparked a three-years and counting romance.
I tried ordering that entire run-on sentence as a coffee once, but the Barista merely looked up and said, “Wait, was that with Skim or 2%? You lost me at Grande.” I realized this was not that moment.
Grocery stores are no different.
I can’t turn a corner of an aisle without sensing another cart about to do the same, crashing into mine. Then we share a laugh, and an awkward pause as I spot a scary amount of cat food in her cart and she spies a jumbo size of toilet paper in mine … only for each of us to jump in at the same time, trying to explain that I have coupons which is the only reason I’d need to buy a chili-cookoff amount of this stuff and she claims she isn’t a crazy cat lady, but that this is the only flavor her one cat will eat so she’s stocking up before they run out. We laugh, when we realize we’re nervously talking over one another. I tell her it’s okay. I have a cat too. So we set up a play date “for our cats”. And four years later, we still get to tell new people the story about how cat food and toilet paper brought us together.
Now there’s always the feeling that a zombie plague is about to hit, too, when I’m at grocery stores. Don’t get me wrong. But that feeling doesn’t carry over to the coffee shops.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s intuition, and something’s bound to happen at one of these locations. Maybe it’s just the subliminal messaging like something out of They Live. Who knows?
For all I know, I’m meant to fall in love at the lobby-level coffee terrace within a skyscraper, right before having to rescue everyone from a German terrorist, while in my tank top and bare feet. There’s always that.
random thoughts at three a.m. 