coffee

I'm sitting in my office, here in this basement library, on what is turning out to be a beautiful spring day after days of gray skies and rain. The ceiling was leaking when I got here this morning (as it often does after a night of rain) so I spent the first half hour mopping up the floor and strategically placing empty plastic recycling pails.

I'm sitting here in my office on a gorgeous spring day, feeling a little bit washed out under florescent lights in this windowless, airless space, but I am also smiling and thinking about coffee.

A particular coffee, actually, and an hour or so shared with an old friend after work yesterday. She came to meet me at the library at closing time, and it was raining and windy. We walked down Broadway looking for a quiet place to hole up for a bit, ended up at Absolute bagels, wind-blown and damp and cold.

Our conversation was warm, though -- underwritten by a mutual affection that I had almost forgotten was there, had ever been there. This was Elizabeth, you see; Crazy E, as I sometimes, and horribly, referred to her in the heyday of our living together nine years ago.

We spent a year together, which somehow seemed like a good idea at the time (I was couch-hopping after an aborted attempt at living in Queens -- long story; she was having roommate issues and wanting to move out), but which, in retrospect, was clearly not such a great idea. We had an odd friendship, an intensely emotional and needy and demanding friendship; a friendship that did well, I think, to have a little space built into it. That space disappeared completely, of course, when we moved into our little two-bedroom apartment. We got two cats from the ASPCA. We set up house. We bonded. We fought. Slammed doors. Reconciled. Cried. Stayed up till the wee hours drinking and talking and partaking in certain illicit substances. Drove each other mad. Parted ways, each taking a cat with us (me just fifteen blocks further north, her back to the west coast). Didn't speak for years, first out of anger, then just out of time passing, friendships gone, locations unknown.

She moved back to New York City a year or two ago and we got back in touch, met for dinner once or twice, though the last time we saw each other was a month or two before the election last November, so it'd been awhile. She came to meet me yesterday after work and we walked down Broadway in the rain and ended up sharing an hour over tea and coffee in a little bagel shop and I remembered, then, some of what I had adored about her so much before our year of living together came crashing to an end.

It felt good, during that hour, to experience her laughter again, and her intensity; a quickness caught up in hand gestures and also a propensity for slowly mulling things over before fully giving voice to what's going on behind those sparkling eyes of hers.

We stopped in at West Side Market so she could pick up something for her dinner, then went each our separate ways to the subway. There was this moment as we said goodbye, though, when I reached in to hug her and the hug felt real, felt genuine and natural and warm, and this made me smile as I waited for the train.

I was talking with Alan later in the evening about friendships, and he said that he sees people as planets flying through space, sometimes coming in closer to each other, sometimes flying apart at speeds we can only understand in the abstract. I said I've been realizing lately that friendships wax and wane, but that sometimes, when we're lucky, maybe after we stop needing them quite so badly, maybe after we stop missing them quite so much, people can eventually come back to us.

Eventually we realized we were kind of pretty much saying the same thing, and we laughed, and I was happy to think that Alan's been around all these years, not flying off into space. This, too, made me laugh, and I went off to bed thinking about these two very different friendships, these two extraordinarily different people, that I am lucky enough to have in my life.

I woke up this morning and came to work thinking about coffee and warmth and rain, on this beautiful spring day, and found myself smiling still.