FanPost

Coffee

I was sitting at a metal folding table in October. I was wearing a black suit with the thought that I might will the summer to linger but my coffee was all that kept me warm. I was cold but my neck was sweating. I was staring straight ahead holding my paper cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette wondering where I would be in three months. I was about to head into the job interview that would change my life and I was sitting a block away from the office at a coffee shop that is as of today, closing.

I had been sitting there all my life. I had been buying coffee there every time I was downtown, watching it all crumble around me. Downtown St. John's is dying and her death was known to me long before the time was called. My favourite bars with my favourite waitresses are shells of what they were and those women may as well be lost to history. Toast and tea for her, Iceberg for me. Buy local. It won't matter but you'll feel better. I think she ended up getting married.

Fixed Coffee is closing and so the last link I had to downtown St. John's is severed. Sitting here in Goose Bay, miles away from the person that sat fidgeting outside their shop in October, I can feel a familiar chill on the nape of my neck. Change on the wind and nothing but pale blue sky for as far as my eyes can see. I think sometimes that this place, this time, exists outside of the rest of the world. Things are frozen here. The cold has made everyone a laser focused capitalist. Sign those papers. We'll handle the transfer. You should look at diversifying. I should go look at the sunset.

I used to have an office on the university campus back home. I used to write stories just like this and wonder when I would get to be a real person with a job and Buick and a dog and I would write until my soul felt empty. My bank account is more stable now and yet I feel a wave of uncertainty at all times. I think if I walked south, to the edge of the peninsula, to the shores of this tundra, I would see my home decaying in real time. Put enough distance between you and the problem and you can pretend nothing happened. I fear I have already emptied myself.

From my vantage point on the shore I could see it. The wave building and cresting and then breaking over the wharf. Over the harbour front. Over the downtown streets with their drunks and their artists and their tourists, looking idly on as a province drowns in its own mistakes.

Fixed was on a street called Duckworth. Right next to a memorial for the fallen soldiers of the first world war. Newfoundland suffered a loss in that conflict that echoes still in our consciousness. Many of us have never felt properly Canadian, with our funny accents and love of the water and hatred of the mainlander's ways. We have only been Canadian for about three generations, and joining Canada really just prolonged our inevitable demise. There are still those alive who know how many answered roll call on the second day of July.

I see it in the people who drink themselves to death and the people who work themselves to death and the people who fled the island for a chance to work themselves to death. Birth rates are trending down and emigration is trending up.

Why does the closure of a coffee shop affect me this way? I was there maybe once a month and half the time the coffee tasted like it was strained over cat shit if I'm honest about it. Still, I'd sat there for hours at a time, reflecting on what was or was not and thinking about what might be. The view was undeniable. The park, overlooking the harbour front with a view of The Narrows. All manner of people passing by in the streets. I had been sitting there before no fewer than three of the most important moments of my life. Could it all have been chance? Or was something drawing me to this corner of my sickened but beautiful city?

I sat there after I got my first paid gig as a writer. I sat there when I found out I would likely be losing my job. I sat there before the interview for my current job. All around me the city was falling down brick by brick and I was so focused on finding something better for myself that I almost never noticed. The hospital I was born in, on the other end of downtown, sits an abandoned death trap where the homeless and drug addled live. There is a building of indeterminate age that needs to be torn down to make way for something new. I am confident that it is never going to be torn down.

Fixed was a weird place where they sold local band's cassettes — because hipsters never did figure out how to make money — and weird knickknacks littered the walls and floors. Flyers for shows in 2011 and a floor model television from the late seventies upon which the cream and sugar could be found. A small man with a suspicious looking smile who made great coffee and a blonde woman with bad tattoos who made horrible coffee and a woman with dark hair and half rimmed glasses that appeared to work there but also appeared to never be doing anything.

There truly was nothing special there. Large coffee, two sugar. Oh, the sugar is on the counter. Sorry about that. No, no I don't need my change. You're welcome.

Summertime, the wind was warm and unnatural. I sat and watched the sunset in late August. I will sit there in the park and watch the sunset. I am already sitting there and I always have been.

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