lovecoffee

My chair that I left this morning is brown leather, button-tufted, the kind that creases like a face over time. My reading lamp bends on a black iron arm. The room, when I closed the door behind me, held that particular indoor quiet a place keeps when no one is in it. Some mornings you leave a room because you know what you need is outside it, in the moving world, even if you can’t quite say what you’re looking for.

Outside, March. In Santa Fe, March carries a quality harder to name than what the temperature suggests. The air has altitude in it. Cold enough still to feel on the skin, but the light is starting to angle differently, the way it does before something arrives and hasn’t yet. Leaving the house this morning, I felt what I always feel at the start of spring: a kind of lift in the chest. Not hope exactly. Something more physical. More like the body recognizing what it’s capable of, remembering on its own before the mind catches up. I’ve been feeling something like that about the novel, too. A readiness I had not quite authorized.

I walked past Cowgirl’s, a BBQ smokehouse, whose hand-painted sign always makes me smile.

A bare cottonwood on the street in front of someone’s house. I stopped and looked up through it. The branches were holding the sun at their center, a white-hot point in deep blue, and the tree looked like it was waiting for something it already knew was coming. In a few weeks, the leaves will start. Today: just the architecture of it, which is enough. Three hundred sunny days a year make your chest open on the first block of a good walk.

Then the newspaper boxes. I couldn’t have said in advance why they would make me stop.

Nine of them clustered at a corner. Yellow, red, blue, brown. Still showing up every day to a job nobody gave them. The Santa Fe New Mexican, $1.00. A free magazine rack, its stock down to its last few copies. The Southwest Contemporary box has its door hanging open, and inside, where the magazines used to be, a single Starbucks cup, its plastic soft and caving at the rim. Someone has been using it as a trash can. Not maliciously. Out of practicality, which is its own kind of verdict on what the box is for now.

At the base of the Santa Fe’s Best Calendar box: a dark glass bottle. Empty. Upright. Not removed, not explained.

I stood there longer than I meant to.

In the early two-thousands, I used to stop at a newsstand on the way to whatever my then-favorite café. The ritual was specific: find your paper, pay, fold it under your arm, feel the small weight of it settle. Then sit down with your coffee and open it and the smell would come up, that particular ink-and-paper smell I have never once encountered reading anything on a screen. You read about things you hadn’t gone looking for. You were, for that moment, inside the day. Not watching from outside. Something physical happened, and then you were ready to think.

I read more news now than I ever did then. More of it, more often, from more sources, and more to my specific interest. But I still think about the smell of the ink.

The boxes are still there because no one decided they were worth removing. Not quite abandoned. Not quite anything else. I thought about the manuscript in my bag, the novel I had barely admitted I was writing. I’ve published enough books to understand that you don’t get to decide whether the work matters. You make it. You put it out. What stays, I think, is the act of having made the thing. Whether anyone stops to look is a separate question.

The block between the boxes and Crashmurderbusiness is two minutes on foot. By the time the sign appears, you are already deciding whether the rhino or the ferret is the more implausible logo, and by the time you’ve settled on the ferret, the door is open and the coffee smell has arrived.

This is the name of my now-favorite café and also a phrase I still find slightly startling to say aloud. The drinks are named for collective animal nouns. A group of rhinos, it turns out, is called a crash. A group of starlings in flight is a murmuration. A group of tigers is a streak. I did not know any of this before I started coming here, and I find I like knowing it. Someone has put thought into every corner, and it shows without announcing itself. The music at a level that lets you think. Ceramic faces mounted on the adobe wall, watching the room from slightly different angles, each one wearing an expression you can’t quite settle on. I’m sitting in a floral armchair with a rough wood-stump table beside it. A woman wearing headphones, not looking up. A man in the corner with an actual book. The kind of room that holds people without pressing them.

The WiFi password is lovecoffee.

I sat down with my manuscript. My first novel. After many nonfiction books, I am, it turns out, a beginner again. The page doesn’t know or care how many books you’ve published. It’s the same blank beginning it always was. Some mornings that feels like freedom. This morning it feels like both. The questions I keep finding underneath it are the ones I’ve always been asking. Different container. Same question: who are we, and what do we want, and what are we doing with the time we have.

The mug is empty now. A rhino on the ceramic, tilted the way mugs get left when the mind has already moved on. Outside, through the window, the bare tree and the sky it stands against. Someone passes on the sidewalk, coat open, not hurrying. The light coming through the branches is not January light anymore. The day has a lot of it left.