9:2 - counter seat

Heard you were drunk at that party on Friday.

Last time I was at my neighborhood cafe, I ran into a friend who said this to me. His friend had spotted me intoxicated in the corner of the room and described the scene to him. 
Strange. I wasn’t even at the party.

I’m in the cafe again, perched in my go-to spot on the black laminated counter as I was that morning, loose papers and notebooks splayed in front of me alongside a coffee cup crusted with concentric lines like growth rings on tree bark. I’m recalling this moment, thinking about the line between imagination and memory, how little control we have over the – at times, hilariously inaccurate – stories others form and share about us, and how his friend might want to get their eyes checked.

The barista pours me a glass of water and offers me an “暑いですね.” We exchange the obligatory disbelief about the heat and how we’re over half way through the year. Time feels slippery. A lot has happened since the beginning of the year, but much has felt internal, invisible. Recently, I’ve felt the need to intentionally look back and take stock of what I’ve done, bookmark time with concrete memories to reassure myself that I lived it fully.

Next to me, a guy types on his keyboard in a faint patter. Out of the speakers, prolonged organ chords. Kevin Morby's distinct voice singing “Come to Me Now” drifts to my ears, and suddenly I’m in East LA at night, strapped in the passenger seat of my dear friend M’s car as we drive to her place – a little sanctuary that I’d escape to on weekends, back when a week felt unbearably long.

I’d sit at the counter at Kitchen Story scribbling in my journal as I waited for her to close up the boutique where she worked. She’d pick me up to eat wood eared mushrooms at Pine and Crane and tell me about her dates, like the juice shop guy who warned her about closing the toilet lid when flushing to prevent washing karma down the pipes along with bodily waste. Her musings were peppered with Pema Chöndrön quotes. With bellies full, we’d head to her studio apartment in Echo Park, circling around the neighborhood to find the smallest of parking spaces for her to maneuver into. On the walk to her building I’d stamp on bougainvillea petals from the bush that protruded out of the chained link fence and feel the crunch of shattered glass under my black leather boots.

Once inside her studio, she’d pour me water from a pitcher with a long stick of binchotan charcoal submerged. Entering felt like a giant exhale, like releasing the vent of a pressure cooker.

Her nighttime rituals were poetry. She’d turn her ankles in circles with fingers intertwined between her toes, slide a dainty silver ring off her finger and place it on a white triangular ceramic cone, pick up the banjo and sing Leonard Cohen songs. On the nightstand — a rose quartz that she’d hold on her palm, a candle and a nub of blackened palo santo.

There was no AC. One particularly hot day, when it was too hot to sleep, we swirled ice cubes in our mouths. I held mine between my front teeth when it started to numb my cheek as I lay on her bed, which was the centerpiece of the apartment — a cloud-like queen-sized green tea memory foam mattress straight on the floor.

A breathy ballad blares in the cafe speakers and I’m back at the cafe, forearms sticking to the counter.

Would she remember it this way? And how was I like? 

Ironically, I’ve actively been trying to spend more energy envisioning the future rather than recalling the past recently. This memory feels like a fragment of who we were, and a tiny speck of who we are now, filtered through the years that have passed. But what I’m sitting with isn't so much the nostalgia or the potential different versions of these events. It's the feelings that I want to take forward: the softness of a precious friend welcoming me into her world.