Millennial Internet Writer Gets Coffee

by Jessica Misener

I pushed open the door to Starbucks. Was I buying chain coffee ironically? Meta-ironically, in an attempt to escape my upper class suburban upbringing but then reconnect with it? Sincerely? My heart hammered inside me, dripping down and coating my viscera with doubt. Sometimes your twenties are like that.

What should I get? A pumpkin spice latte? It’s back, you know. I can never make up my mind. I’m indecisive but sometimes I’m decisive but then sometimes I’m indecisive and then I get decisive again. I hid this for so long, buffeted back and forth by the churning wills of the world. My parents never saw it. I kept it coiled in. I never let you see it, no, I never did. By then the line elbows past me.

I pushed my money into the barista’s hand. His name is Morgan and he has a master’s degree in art history. Pushing, always pushing. Why do I push? Is it because I’m single? I thought about how later I could post this on Facebook but would anybody even read it? Maybe I could tweet about it but would anyone see it? Would I remain a blip on someone’s newsfeed, a tiny quark in the fabric of social media time? I’m carrying my coffee over to the creamer station but who really cares?

I wanted you there. Because I did. I remembered your chiseled jawline. I wanted to touch your face gently, your face that would have looked so handsome in this carefully researched mood lighting. You would have offered to pour cream into my coffee for me. Whole milk. You always remembered. I wanted to take the packets of Splenda and rip them apart then, showering the floor with tiny grains of carcinogenic artificial sweetener like the way you shredded my heart into little carcinogenic particles, except without the cancer, because my heart is fine.

A woman is feeding a Bistro Box to her toddler. The thing is you ruined it. You broke me from the inside and shattered me and it will never go back.

I put in my iPod headphones. I’m doing that thing where the new Lady Gaga song comes out and I play it on repeat for 3 days and then I get fucking sick of it and never listen to it again. One earphone fell out. I thought about falling and not falling and rising and how I used to feel the breath of your sweaty lungs, your supple air pulsing over me that night, that last night, as you told me that earbuds always fall out and have shitty bass dynamics and I should get some real fucking headphones already.

A homeless guy fell asleep in the big comfy chair and then woke up and left and someone else unknowingly plopped down in it right after him, and don’t they realize? Don’t they realize how gross that is? Sometimes the world is a screaming rage crying out with sorrow and all we can do is keep crying and crying until you come back, because I miss you sitting inside this corporate coffeehouse and you have no idea, do you.

Jessica Misener does live in Brooklyn. Photo by Mykl Roventine.

See also: Some Pitches for Thought Catalog.