So many afternoons spent in coffee shops with a notebook and a promise. I believed the café would be the key, that somehow the right atmosphere would unlock something the apartment kept locked down. Mostly it did. That turned out not to be the same as getting anywhere.
Turns out, living in a prison of anxiety does a spectacular job of keeping the creative process under maximum security. So I had to engineer an escape plan. In a way, it was literal.
This was long before laptop nomads colonized every corner table, though I'd later discover the centuries-old tradition of writers seeking refuge in cafés and pubs. I knew nothing of that lineage then. I just needed somewhere to sit and work that wasn't home.
I'd stock up on notebooks and migrate to these aroma-filled sanctuaries, hoping to ditch the gravitational pull of my depressing apartment and focus on thoughts and words. Plenty of both. The daydreams and the distractions took their cut, but the pages came.
I didn't dream my way into the stories I was trying to write. That would have required work. Pen meeting paper. Daydreaming was just intermission from the loneliness, failure, and boredom that seemed to rent every available space in my head.
Then I'd snap back. The moment would arrive when I'd drag my gaze away from some hypnotic tree branch outside the window, or the barista I was too shy to talk to beyond ordering my sugar-drenched disaster of a coffee, and finally focus on the page.
Then, like turning a faucet, it would flow.
Not always. Sometimes the faucet was rusted shut, and the idea of committing to words felt like prying open a door that hadn't moved in years. The weight of that commitment was crushing for a brain already drowning in existential misery, most of which, let's face it, I'd earned.
But when it came, it came. And there was something about it that felt like channeling forces beyond myself. Looking back, I'm less convinced about the cosmic muse business. Probably just the conscious and the subconscious swirling together and shoving whatever they made onto the page.
What the Room Was For
It took me two decades to see what those afternoons were doing.
The café was the opposite of a hiding place. At home there are a hundred reasons to be in a room. You live there. Not writing gets absorbed into laundry and errands and the day going sideways, and by evening you can't locate the failure because it's spread thin across everything.
The coffee shop had one purpose. I went there to write. So on the days I didn't, there was nothing else the day could have been about. Mission failed, clean and legible, nowhere for it to hide. Those were the worst days I had.
Most days weren't that. Most days I wrote.
Which is the part that took twenty years to understand. I wasn't failing to write. I was writing constantly. Tens of thousands of pages, probably hundreds of thousands, notebook after notebook after notebook. And I scrapped nearly all of it. Rewrote the same opening a dozen times, walked away, started something else, came back, tore it down again. Perfectionism on one side and no ability to stay with one project on the other, and between them they ate two decades of real work.
That's the sanctuary of almost. Not a room where I avoided writing. A room where I wrote and wrote and never finished.
I'm still here. Not much further along, but carrying some personal victories. Closer to my dream than I was back then, even if that's delusion talking. There's not much difference between reality and fantasy for a mind that ping-pongs between hope and despair.
It has gotten better over time. Maybe the higher powers deserve some credit now. Not sure I'm ready to give it to them though. After all, I'm the one who slogged through that never-ending shitstorm of a life.
But lately the victories feel real. Even if they're still buried neck-deep in depression.
Ah, that word again.