A blogger I came across recently wrote that he had never been to a café. His mental image came from imagination and from films and TV: a quiet place to get away. I noted down 'café, writing' in my notebook. It was a small note for my second five-hundred-day writing project. Compared with the first, the obvious difference is age and experience. The bigger difference is where I write.
The first five hundred days
During the first project, most of it happened in cafés. For three months after I quit my job, I still left home as if I had somewhere to go, and spent whole days in cafés. A lot of ideas came from what happened around me: the people, the sounds, the small social rules.
One story began with a bathroom wall. At the end of a corridor opposite the restroom, customers had left quotes they considered meaningful, in that earnest internet-quote way. Three of those lines became the seed for a piece. Another story was about a painter who became a serial killer. He was obsessed with women whose smiles caught his attention. He could never paint a smile he was satisfied with, so he sat in a quiet corner of a café and watched women come and go. From their expressions he read what he wanted: whether she was alone, waiting for a boyfriend or a friend, who was on her mind, what she was smiling at on her phone.
What the corner seat shows you
The pleasure of writing in a café is that you cannot predict the next second. Put on headphones. Stare into space when ideas dry up. Add narration to strangers. Watch how they move, guess what connects them. Analyze a person waiting alone and predict who will arrive, what kind of relationship it is, what mood the arrival will bring. That is why I liked the corner. It wasn't necessarily quiet. The coffee grinder could sound like a plane coming down.
I once jolted awake there. Fortunately few people were around; otherwise they would have laughed at my face. I had just recognized the huge roar like a plane about to crash as the grinder. I felt amused, honestly, though I didn't want to admit that part of the pleasure was being alive. My phone was lighting up with messages. I didn't open it. I wanted to stay a little longer in that drop from dread to relief.
The umbrella, the door, the counter
Cafés offer another kind of pleasure: small experiments in human nature. Nothing life-and-death, usually. Just small things in an unremarkable corner. I was often closest to those corners, feeling the kindness and ugliness they released, and thinking about what they said about people.
At the entrance there was an area for wet umbrellas on rainy days. People left them there. Occasionally someone arrived without an umbrella and left when it was raining, so they borrowed one. Because some people took umbrellas, others lost theirs. The little rack became a ledger of need and convenience.
In winter, the door should have stayed closed to keep the heat in. But it was often wide open. People sitting in the draft were uncomfortable, yet nobody wanted to be the one to close it. Whoever came in didn't close it. After sitting for a while, they noticed the cold, but they didn't get up to close it either, because they had broken the rule first. The next person didn't close it, and the temperature kept dropping. People who had been cold for a while also refused to close it on their way out, because the people who had let the cold in were still sitting there. Why end it for them?
Then there is the self-service counter: refills, milk, sugar, napkins. It is an unwritten rule that public means self-restraint. You use it, but you also consider the next person. A public toilet is not a perfect analogy, but the principle is close. The signs ask you to leave things usable for the next person. Some cafés use gentler language: respect others, keep yourself safe, keep the environment clean. The point is to avoid naming the people who leave a mess, stand on the seat, or never flush. The familiar messages are there anyway, whether it is the men's-room line about stepping closer for civilization or the rhyme about flushing on the way out.
Seasons and timestamps
The five-hundred-day project had another hidden pleasure: it runs through a full year of seasons. Cafés feel different in summer and winter. The first project had those seasonal traces too. We cannot argue with that rule. In summer I miss winter. In winter I try to remember how I found comfort in the heat. Those changes become timestamps between the lines. They are unique and one-time. Another summer arrives, and the feeling of the previous one is already gone. That is part of why writing matters: it records, but it also turns.
Some café stories were not mine. They came from seeing a barista at work. I remember one about a person who ran into an ex in a café. The ex worked there. The person watched for a long time: the ex opening the machine, making coffee, whipping cream, handing cups to customers. Every movement looked innate. I forgot the exact final judgment, but the gist stayed with me: maybe everyone has a skill that can be cultivated with anyone.
Another piece came from a glass skylight. It reminded me of a movie scene, or rather a structure that appears in many movies that want urgency and tragedy: a weight that can be sacrificed, a person who should be saved, and a scale that cannot keep both alive. The setting changes, but the pressure is the same.
The urge fades
By now I should have more free time and more chances to go to cafés, but I rarely want to write in one. I used to try other public places too: libraries, quiet bars, a bar at the bottom of a CBD tower, cafés away from busy streets, bars in old neighborhoods waiting to be demolished. Each place gave me odd ideas. Some were noisy but stable. Some were quiet but restless. Every district has its own rhythm, and every rhythm gives off a different atmosphere, whether it fits you or not.
Café writing was only a column in the previous project. It can't continue in the same way. I dislike crowded, mixed places more and more. I absorb emotional information from everyone, and I can't always control the strange ability: if I watch someone waiting, I really can predict what kind of person is coming, what relation they have, what mood they are in. In a crowded café I shut myself off. In my own space now, I open my inner life instead.
I still don't like crowded cafés, though I rarely get my wish. When I end up in one, I use headphones and choose music to match the surroundings. Once I sat by a window facing a one-way arterial road. The traffic never stopped. It made me strangely dizzy. To keep it from pulling me apart, I chose ocean-wave white noise. The cars became a river pouring toward the sea, and somewhere out of sight the waves were eroding everything around them.