Where Emma Sat

It was nothing more than a hole in the wall. It smelled of cinnamon, ripened bananas and, of course, coffee. It was always hot where Emma sat, near the front of the house. That’s where they brewed the coffee. She worked best at the corner table, with the little porcelain lamp whose time-worn shade was decorated with faded green roses and smudged with coffee and cookie fingerprints.

Emma studied here often and she loved the random items that decorated the colorful walls. The frame on the wall nearest her held a map of the California coast. It read, Geology and active faults in the San Diego Bay Area. She turned to face the crimson leaves falling outside and mused if perhaps there was someone sitting quietly in some out-of-the-way coffee joint in San Diego studying a map of her own small Indiana town. That reminded her of how she’d once thought if she dug a deep enough hole, she’d discover China. Her gaze followed the Christmas bulb-strewn water pipe that protruded from the ceiling and settled on an elaborate navy and burgundy tapestry of the Virgin Mary. The virgin was sandwiched between a vintage television set that now served as a large fish tank and the colorful chalkboard menu that took up one entire wall.

She dropped her eyes to her laptop screen and sighed.

Two paragraphs.

That’s all she’d written, and she’d been there for over an hour. She was tired. By day, she crunched numbers for the university to pay for the night classes she needed to finish her degree in writing.

She’d promised herself she’d finish this story tonight. It was only a few pages. Besides, it’s creative writing? No research required. Easy, right?

She let out another frustrated sigh.

She noticed that the electric cord of the floor lamp against the wall followed the purple lines in the patterned paper, curled around the heavily-laden bulletin board and snaked somewhere out of sight. Tacked to the cork were faded photographs and old articles torn from newspapers. A headline read, If it were easy, they wouldn’t give a badge for it.

Emma found no inspiration there.

“It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

The voice came from Emma’s left. “I’m sorry?”

The old woman was smiling. It was the kind of smile a teacher gives a child when she asks a stupid question. It didn’t reach her eyes. Her teeth were yellowed like an old photograph, but perfectly straight. “Writer’s block,” she said. Her voice was raspy and staccato, like the tapping of her bright red index finger on the table top.

“It’s a bitch.”

Emma flushed. “Is it that obvious?”

The woman gave her a curt nod that made her white, wiry curls fall away from her face. “It’s all in your head,” she said, turning back to her own screen. The glow from her laptop cast a ghoulish hue on her pale skin.

Gee, thanks, Emma thought, as she went back to her own work, taking a quick gulp of cold coffee.

Is this what writers’ block feels like?

She didn’t know. Besides, she had always found that term presumptuous. To have writers’ block, one had to assume that they were indeed a writer, and sometimes Emma still wondered if she had a right to such a title.

She slid lower in her seat, rested her head against the cushioned back and stared at the words swimming on her screen. “Type. Just type,” she muttered quietly.

All they could hear was the sound of goodbye. Its echo bounced off the trees, reverberated in the chimes of the limestone clock tower, and scampered across the stone floor of the kissing fountain where they’d always meant to go… Not even the birds could chirp loud enough to break that silence. Her words had cut him to the bone, and they both knew this was the last time they would watch the leaves fall.

Emma reread the paragraph she’d just composed and rolled her eyes. Her writing was always the same. She lived in a way that left little time for facing her past. Facing the biggest failure of her young life.

There were times she’d been able to forget she’d ever been married at all. Yet, when she put pen to paper, all that came out was heartbreak and bitterness. A good professor once said it wasn’t such a good idea to write what you know, but Emma found it impossible to write anything else.

Click click clickity click.

Her white-haired friend was typing so furiously that a bit of coffee had sloshed over the edge of her mug. Emma wanted to wipe up the mess badly. She pursed her lips and turned back to her writing, goaded by the old lady’s casual confidence. She obviously wasn’t suffering from writers’ block.

Ha! She didn’t have writers’ block. She had life’s block! Emma smiled quietly at her own joke. It was true. Everything had been on hold since she’d walked out of her pretty-as-a-picket-fence existence. She was distanced from everyone and everything. She had once found pleasure in her work. Now, she spent hours blankly studying her computer screen, too worn down to do anything more than watch how numbers and words join together in what look like hieroglyphics if you stared at them long enough. She often wondered when her boss would figure out she’d become useless. Sometimes, it felt like the life had drained completely out of her at a moment when she wasn’t paying attention.

It had only been three months. But to Emma, it seemed like an eternity. “Look at all you have here,” everyone – her family, her friends, her husband – had reasoned. Emma had known all that. She’d been reasoning with herself for a year before she finally packed her bags. It was a risk. And sometimes she wondered if they were right. So many people lived their lives being just happy enough. Why should she deserve the chance of something more?

Her mind was wandering again. She could hear the vigorous clicks of her neighbor’s fingers upon the keys and felt irritated that she seemed to be the only one in this artsy little hole that couldn’t get a grip. Out of the corner of her eye, Emma studied the way the old lady’s cursor seemed to fly across the screen in spurts, like a race car driver on a street lined with stoplights. She would type furiously for about 45 seconds, then stop, tapping on the edge of the table. Then she’d be off again.

“Are you a writer?” Emma asked.

“I am,” she replied, without an upward glance.

“What are you writ—”

“Are you?” the woman asked, facing Emma full on. The woman sat neatly, her legs crossed at the knees. Her lips were pressed tightly together, drawing a small line across her face. The line was the same red shade as her fingernails.

Emma shrugged, “I… well… I’m working on my degree in creative writing.”

“That doesn’t make you a writer.” The woman’s eyes were piercing.

Unsettled and more than slightly irritated, Emma scoffed, “Oh? What does?”

“Writers are not like doctors or accountants. Writers are born. You either are, or you’re not.” She turned back to her computer and resumed tapping at the keys. “If you question it, then you probably aren’t.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Emma said, in dismissal.

The woman cocked an eyebrow, but continued her rapid pecking at the keys.

Unable to let the matter pass, Emma went on. “I’ve been writing since I was a child. Everyone says I’ll write something great. Someday… It’s just that lately, I…”

What was she trying to say?

The woman turned. “You what?”

Emma blushed. “I just can’t seem to find inspiration anywhere. Everything I write is the same. There’s so much out there to write about, yet all that comes out of me is… well… me.”

“Perhaps you’re look at things from the wrong perspective.”

Emma pondered that. “How do you mean?”

The old woman nodded toward the front of the house. “When you look at that old man there, what do you see?”

He was a regular, Emma knew. He always wore a silver golfer’s cap tilted low above his right eye. He ordered a dark coffee and stirred it for a good 15 minutes before he ever took a sip. He passed time filling in the squares of the newspaper’s latest Sudoku puzzle.

The woman gave a dry laugh. “You are only seeing with your eyes. Think.”

The old lady’s own green eyes glistened. “Who is he? Why does he come here? Why does he sit alone? A man can just as easily drink expensive coffee at home. He wears that cap to hide his balding head because he still takes pride in his appearance, a carryover from his youth, when he was a very handsome man. He orders dark coffee because he won’t sleep anyway.”

The old woman was leaning forward, so close that Emma could taste her bitter-coffee breath. “He hasn’t slept well since his wife passed away last year. He doesn’t enjoy numbers or Sudoku, but crosswords remind him of his wife and the days they would lay in bed, he with a puzzle and her with a Danielle Steele. The isolation of their large old house is unbearable, so he seeks solace here. Where they never sat together. Where there are no memories. No one speaks to him. Few see him. This reminds him that we all fade with age. His days are numbered. And, in this, he finds peace.”

“How do you know all that?” Emma asked, bewildered.

With an exasperated sigh, the woman leaned back in her seat. “I don’t know… That is just what I see…”

“Oh,” Emma laughed at her own naiveté . “It’s not true.”

“From where I’m sitting, it is.”

With that, the woman turned back to her screen.

Emma finished off her coffee. Her screen stared back at her, its cursor blinking mockingly. “What do you see when you look at me?”

Mid-strike, the woman paused. Her smile was expectant, and Emma immediately regretted asking.

“What do I see?…” The old lady trailed off, taking a sip of her coffee and closing the lid of her laptop.

“I see a young woman who sits at this very table each night. She looks at the same bulletin board and the same art on the walls and the same people day after day. She comes here because she expects to be inspired. She knows it well. She knows that at 9:45 every night, the barista will pick up the dish tub and begin washing dishes. She knows the delicate curve of the miniature lamp sitting on her favorite corner table. These walls, these sounds, these smells… They are the sights and sounds and smells of a second home. Here, she knows her place.

“Yet,” and here the lady paused to stir her drink, taking an unhurried swallow. “She knows nothing about the people that patronize the café. All she is able to see is herself. Her problems. Her mistakes. Her miseries.

“She stares at her screen willing it to write for her. She searches in vain for the words to write her own story, missing everyone else’s along that path. And, in the end, she sits at her favorite corner table in the place that she swears inspires her most, writing nothing, because there’s nothing to say from where she’s sitting.”

The old woman started to say more, but instead caught sight of her leather-banded wristwatch. With a start, she stood, slipping her laptop into her black bag and strode resolutely out of the café.

Emma sat quietly watching the bus boy sweep. It was 10:15. She needn’t look at the clock to know. She studied the gritty mason jars that held whole beans in varying shades of brown. They neatly lined the wall below the window. The streetlight’s rays pierced the pane, crept into the dusty coffee bean jars and sparked a golden glow that blazed a trail across the room.

The door banged noisily as students hurried to get their late night fix before the coffee house closed. Emma packed her bag and headed into the chilly evening air.

She walked briskly across the street into a French Pastry shop she’d always wanted to try. It was a local favorite. She ordered a French soda and chose a window seat, so she could study her coffee house nook from this vantage.

She watched the swaying arms of an old oak that stood behind the great stone building the coffee shop called home. Fall leaves still stubbornly clung to the tree’s branches, preventing the moon from fully kissing the café goodnight. There was no hint of the hustle and bustle she knew was still going on within. Rather, it looked peaceful, even unassuming.

She opened her laptop. The cursor was waiting patiently, inviting her to propel it across the page.

And, so, she did.

© 2010 Jasmine Myers

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Jasmine Myers is a writer with nine years professional experience in communications and marketing. She is the owner of a casual food blog, Eat Move Write, and writes corporate marketing pieces, articles, and fitness and nutrition articles. She is currently writing her first book, Hungry, a story about her own 200-lb weight loss. For more information, visit her blog, http://www.eatmovewrite.blogspot.com.

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