Always the Last Customer

photo by Dragon Weaver.

I am about to become the sole patron at the TeaSource on a cold, windy Friday night. From just a few yards down the sidewalk, a movie house expels crowds of couples at various stages of dating, families catching the latest Pixar animation, teenagers squawking in little flocks that quickly form, break apart, and just as quickly gather again.

Here I am, sitting alone at a side table in this quiet, warm little tea shop. Somber music plays faintly over the room. A college-aged shop girl ignores me from behind the counter. Or is she wondering what the hell I am doing here on a Friday night, the only customer that remains? This is how I choose to live my life, peacefully, cognizant, introspective, and solitary. There it is, that word that holds such allure for me; the solitarian.

A second employee appears. They rotate taking their breaks in the back room or skirting outside with a cell phone held to the ear. This new tea-girl packs up boxes for catalog orders. She pours looseleaf tea into tinfoil bags, seals them, slaps labels onto boxes, all of the while chewing on her gum and sniffling. Tea powder gets in the nasal passages, causes a tickle you can’t scratch.

People shuffle past the shop window, shoulders hunched against the wind. Maybe it is the cold wind outside, or the fact that I am alone in a teashop on a Friday night, but the Feist song playing over the speakers has never sounded so solemn. I think of going home and playing her CD in its entirety, but I know that it won’t hold the same spell for me that it does here, in a warmly lit shop on Cleveland Avenue on a Friday night, out among people, watching them without interacting.

New customers arrive, families coming out of the cold for a cup of non-caffeinated herbal teas and lemon cakes for their children, newlyweds with their magazines or laptops, occasionally looking dejectedly at one another.

I eavesdrop on a young couple pitched forward on their chairs. It must be their first date; I can tell by how interested and happy they are with one another. I am glad that I can still feel happiness for them, being a divorcee that could instead be thinking jadedly of their naïveté. I feel their optimism warming the back of my neck. It wasn't so long ago that I felt the same thing, right? I feel it again through them.

I stay until the customers slowly filter out, and I’m once again the last customer. It’s time to close up shop, to finish my writing, but I want to end with something else, anything besides what is directly in front of me. I want to block out music in the teashop with the rhythm of words. Words that ring with their own music on the tongue, the harmony of vowels, the sharp staccato of consonants.

What do I see? Foothills flicker in the light of a campfire. Orange and yellow shadows play like silent films on the sand and brush. Burning logs collapse upon themselves, letting loose a spray of sparks like a burst of confetti falling skyward.