I fell in love with a place

I was a little upset today; anhedonic, really. Good things were coming up, good things had happened, and I didn't care. I didn't feel a thing, really. Couldn't. It happens sometimes, where nothing in the world feels any good and I keep on living but not for the joy of living because joy's not a word I can understand.

I was at a place really near my house. It's one of those "old town" places that your town might have if it's old enough and small enough. All these antique shops and eateries. I probably sound like I'm making it out to be sort of phoney or dull but I really do love it, it's a good place. It's where the library was.

I went to the library for a meeting I was having there. The meeting didn't go nearly as well as I'd liked, and after loitering in the library thereafter and feeling like a miserable little git, I decided to solve my problem by going out for ice cream.

After some deliberation as to where in the area I should get ice cream, I settled for an Italian cafe that I've been to a few times but mostly with my family for the times they all wanted to go out and get gelato. It was gelato, you see, that I got in the end, not ice cream. It's similar but I liked it just as much.

I'm sitting here now at my computer. This place is beautiful. There's a chandelier and those off-yellow plaster walls that look like they're stained by something in a good way and soft glowing lamps along the wall at intervals and those windows who are made of regular panes and whose edges do that slopey sort of thing in relation to the iron surrounding the pieces of glass, so you can see out but it's distorted by the glass but that's all you need to know about what's outside you, that needn't distract you now.

It's very European for lack of a better way of describing it, and it's the sort of place that some might call "pretentious" and some might call "hipster" and that I would call "probably where Jean Paul Sartre stayed up til 2 AM writing his philosophical ramblings, which he turned in to the publishers unedited". Except Jean Paul Sartre didn't write in this cafe. He wrote in a cafe in some place in Europe. I don't know much about Jean Paul Sartre other than that he was an existentialist, he said "Hell is other people", and he wrote his philosophical ramblings in cafes at 2 AM and he'd hand his stuff in to the publishers unedited.

I had a bit of a breakdown at a coffee shop recently because I was with a friend and I read her the poem I wrote while we were there and she called it "pretentious". It made me think I wasn't writing with enough candor or sincerity or realness, and that's the only way I can tell if a poem is good, really, if it's real. Turns out she meant it as a compliment but I still couldn't shake the feeling of irony present in my writing and subsequently having an existential crisis in a coffee shop. 

I went for gelato and I ate it outside the place but I went in, figuring I'd loiter inside (where it was air conditioned and where the location of the electrical outlets was more convenient). I ordered an Italian soda. It's violet-flavored. They have an astounding array of flavors for their sodas.

I sat down at a table and did some poem-writing. There's no one else here save for the staff. Empty chairs at empty tables. I've chosen a place towards but not quite at the back where I can look at them all. Doesn't look like anyone else is coming, too.

It's pretentious as anything.

And you know what?

I love it.

I love it sincerely and non-ironically and with whatever sort of thing I have that passes for a heart. And because I love it sincerely, then it's not pretentious. And if it is, then it doesn't matter because it's pretentiousness that comes in earnest. It doesn't matter because I love where I am. I love it. And that's what matters.

Love at first sight has happened today. I have fallen in love with this gorgeous place and I will continue to see it as gorgeous and I will write here and I will submit my poetry here and I will bleed words onto pages here and my poems and stories will tear out of whatever foreign thing constitutes my heart and I will put them to words here.

I will drink their tea and eat their biscuits. I will drink their sodas whose flavors - violet, cinnamon, lavender - do not exist in most people's imaginations as soda flavors. I will drink these which surpass others' attempts at mundanity. I will drink these non-mundane sodas, I will drink them. On the warmer days I will order their gelatos and I will ask for the two most unlikely flavors mixed in the same cup and they'll give me what I asked for, and it will be delicious.

I will fall in love with this place and I will occupy a corner here forever. Even when I'm not here, my heart and mind will be. A funny thing happens to me; sections of whatever metaphor for a heart I have, they split themselves off and leave themselves in places. And sometimes those places are familiar and are the locations I visit every day and sometimes the bits of my heart stay in places to which I never return. But I fall in love with places. That's the one thing you could say I love. Places. And I've come in this short piece of time to love this place. That insanity called love - at first sight, even - has stricken me and my heart has immediately filled the room. A piece of me has lodged here indefinitely. Maybe even indelibly.

This is what love feels like. I've fallen in love. I will write here and I will love this place and I will be the most pretentious git imaginable.

And it will be good because it will be earnest and pure and real.

And these feelings counteract any of the pretension that is so often what we call it when one loves in earnest something beautiful.