The Coffee Shop
I hate Kierkegaard
About five years ago, I wrote a letter to my future wife. I don’t remember what it says—it’s in one of my old journals that I’m not opening at the moment.
I was writing it on the countertop at “Coffee Shop,” an old spot on 29 Union Square West that closed after 28 years in 2018 because of high rent and wages. Before that, it was a cafe called “Chase.” Now, it’s home to a Chase bank—cool and detached like the rest of what New York City is becoming.
I decided to wait out the rush hour commuter frenzy and reserved myself to a couple rum and cokes and dinner. I was coming from The New School where I had just checked out of the library “The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.” I put a lot of faith in God at that time, but I wanted something from him and I was desperate and vain enough to believe that I mattered enough to get it, to believe that I could skip the queue of others with matters more important than mine. I stepped off the line long ago, happy that others can take my place. God is a little preoccupied right now, so it’s important to keep your ticket number. But unless you’re one of his selected few that he has convinced he speaks to, don’t cling too hard.
So I sat there getting heavy and made a comment to the server about how “I haven’t heard songs like these in forever.” “Float On” by Modest Mouse was playing, compliments of her manager, and it reminded me of Rock Band, and discovering Bob Dylan, Smashing Pumpkins, Talking Heads, and the other icons of Rock and Roll.
The server, whose name I probably could have recalled under different circumstances, was a photographer, but now I think that, in line with the rumors of who the restaurant hired, she was an “aspiring model.” But it’s New York City, who isn’t?
The only woman I cared about anyway (at that moment) lied crying in bed over someone who, at one point before I found myself here, before I found myself in many of the messes that ensued, was once my best friend. But don’t get it mixed up—I was his devil, not the other way around.
Nevertheless, it was then that I knew I was writing that letter to someone I didn’t know then. Someone who would love me because that’s just how things would be. When I finally met her, I was unsuspecting and blindsided by my own stupidity. But sometimes you know that you’re no good and realize that you are not entitled to the world’s forgiveness, let alone the forgiveness of those you love. You don’t decide who extends to you their grace, especially when you don’t deserve it. Jesus, I refuse to be like Kierkegaard. Let me be Shelley, Keats, or some high school poet that can’t see that he has lost—anything to reignite me.
So for what it’s worth I’d like to rewrite that letter and begin
I know you don’t care for me anymore, but I’m tired of pretending like I don’t miss you.
"You don’t decide who extends to you their grace, especially when you don’t deserve it. Jesus..."
That is where you could have ended this column with a period.
And none of us deserve it. But He gives it. Lovely work.