How To Kill An Hour

and preserve a person.

11:11am at Rhythm Zero on December 1st. I’ve got one hour to kill before my 12:30pm yoga class with Conor. I really enjoyed his class I took last week and am looking forward to feeling strong again.

At Rhythm Zero, I am surrounded by wealth. The wealth of the people who rent apartments on the East River. There are women chatting to each other with ESL accents and men in the weekend workwear starter pack: Salomon sneakers and canvas jackets, nature-forward beanies. It’s either their facials or the long run in the Hudson Valley over the Thanksgiving weekend that have given them a noticeable glow. Hell, even the candle lit in this place costs more than my whole outfit, which is ironically made up of Brandy Melville, Lululemon, Free People, Aritzia, Gucci, and a scrunchie on my right wrist from Wimbledon. I’m dressed like everything I think I’m not but actually am. This is a spectacular revelation, especially before arriving at a mirrorless yoga studio.

I wonder if the people I’m looking at also notice me in the corner on the couch writing about and observing them, making up stories of who they are and how they got here. How’d she make enough money to have an office of her own? Her winter coat is so beautiful – is it Comme? I bet she’s got a routine. I’ve got a routine for buying my coffee out every day and spending my time thinking about everything I’ve ever done wrong. I’m looking at her and I see someone who moves forward.

A man with his dog on a leash just spun out of the door revealing a yellow Starface sticker on his forehead. I wonder if I can find a way to rebrand my flaws the way stars did pimples. Perhaps sitting in the corner in my ballet-core yoga outfit journaling on graph paper with Instagram deleted off my phone is a way of rebranding my “being hard on myself.” To everyone else, I look soft. If nothing else, I look like I’ve got something to write down. I look focused and like I’m in the middle of something before noon on Monday. Like I didn’t take an extra day off work after a holiday break because I legitimately needed it. Like I’m not burnt out. Like I’m not contemplating with every fiber in my being how I’m going to get up and go to the office tomorrow.

In walks two more pairs of Salomon’s and I’m officially glad I opted for something a little more “me” this morning: my secondhand fuzzy loafers from Japanese brand Caminando. A beautiful woman, older, has sat at the table in the center of the room with blue-green glasses and a scrunchie that pulled her hair into a perfect bun after removing her stylish, tight snowcap. She’s got an expensive white cable knit sweater on and, imagine this – not Salomon’s – but blacked out Nike’s. She’s also got a notebook. She took it out of a bag and turned several ink-stained pages until she found a blank one and then stared contently out the window ahead of her, pondering her first mark.

I want so badly to ask her what she’s doing here. How did she get here, here being the coffee shop, but also here, like, here-here. She’s pulled out a card, a holiday one I presume, or a thank you, or a get well soon, and I wonder to whom she’s felt called to write a card. It’s beautiful how we can sit in this room with our own words and worlds existing, but not one world being more important than the other. Her writing a card to someone is no different than me doing the same. And if I were to write one right now, the receivers of these two cards in their very separate rooms, or the same, who knows, would experience a similar feeling of gratitude and warmth birthed from this very moment before my yoga class.

I see her sitting on her phone now, though, so I wonder if she’ll ever get to delivering that card at all, or if it will pile up on a long list of to-do’s with competing levels of urgency and be found in two months when the pressure of the pile erupts and something must finally get to-done’d. That is, if she’s anything like me, which I’m grandly assuming she is.

I am everyone in this room on any other day. When I am not the girl killing an hour before yoga with Instagram deleted off her phone, I am the girl scrolling with her leg crossed on her knee in the Stussy Paris sweater. I am the girl with shrimp posture in leggings and Uggs working on her laptop without a mouse, killing hours until they are all dead. I am the man collecting his matcha from the bar, although he is me at my most boring, respectfully. I am the group of three catching up quietly, seemingly talking business. I am the man in the red scarf and headphones who hasn’t noticed anyone else in the room with him at all.

I am me today, though, and I’ve just made eye contact with the woman at the table. Not any old eye contact – her whole head and face with it were turned looking at me, into me, as if she could read what I’ve been writing here. Of course she has noticed me, too. I bet she is wondering what I’m writing over here on the couch in the corner. I bet she’s got no clue that I used her to kill an hour.

She’s getting up now and putting on her scarf and hat and putting her dishes away. She’s packing up her notebook and card into her bag and walking out the door. As she does, we make eye contact once more, and I give her a soft smile and nod, and she does the same. She’s gone now, gone like she was never here. Oh, but she was.

I’ve thought curiously about this sort of writing I’ve just done. Writing about other people, strangers, making them immortal in my notebook. Is it creepy? Is it invasive? I technically didn’t ask her anything and I only really glanced up at her for a second maybe five times. I didn’t stare. I didn’t intrude. I’m not even close enough to anyone to be able to hear them breathe. Is this what you do, too, when you are intentionally present in a busy coffee shop? Or am I a writer? And can I write about everything the way I do anything?

I was here. Not because I think anyone else wrote about me, but because I made my presence known to myself. I was here because I see myself in the background of shrimp posture’s Zoom call. She’s got an un-blurred background and her colleagues can see me here, too. I wonder if they are wondering what that girl in the background is writing. Frankly, I don’t care to know what shrimp posture is doing, what the meeting is about, or how she got here. Or when she is going to leave. Or where she is going to go after this. She exists only in contrast to the other people I’ve noticed here who are present. Who are not here at the caffeine gas station hooked up to WiFi to be somewhere else. There’s nothing wrong with her, I just know her very well already, and she is who I’ll be tomorrow, and I’d rather be me today.

I return to the question at hand: what I’ve done here… is it okay? Is this an exploration of my community? Is this an expression of presence? Is this any different than sketching a group of people laughing across the bar on a napkin and slipping it to them as you exit, a very endearing expenditure of attention? If I were to find out that the woman at the table in the center in the black Nike’s wrote about me, and I was her subject, well that’d be delightful. I’d ask her why me? And maybe she’d ask me the same.

I wish her well. I hope she sends the card. I hope she enjoyed her coffee. I hope she left in a hurry after seeing me because I reminded her of something she wanted to do today, or I sparked something in her that made her decisive about her next move. If I were to see her again in another setting, I’m not sure I would even recognize her. But she is written here, forever, having her coffee and looking out the window, the way I’d like to be remembered, too.

Un beso.

The notebook this was originally written in, on a different day.