SOL: Coffeehouse Life

 

During college, I discovered my love: coffee shops.

I couldn’t believe I had never visited them or worked at one during high school – nothing. I met so many people and I became apart of the little town that I worked in. The town was actually called Pleasantville and I was in love. It was my absolute favorite town and the coffee shop was where I spent all of my time outside of my college classes or my apartment.

Then I found an apartment that was literally down the road from the coffee shop and I was always there. The owner hated the place because her son had up and left her with it and she had no idea how to run it. Myself and a few others stepped in and took all of the shifts and basically ran the place. One day, her son came back and wanted to run the shop. He and his babies mom came from Durango, Colorado and decided they wanted to take the shop back.

This made me love the place even more – it actually turned me into quite the hippie and it was great. There was nothing more that I loved than my coffee shop in Pleasantville. We had our own little community.

The new owners stayed for a little while and then for whatever reason they up and left one day without saying goodbye, leaving everyone to pick up the pieces. This really changed the whole atmosphere of the shop and it was never the same again after that.

I moved on to another coffee shop where the owners had also worked at the coffee shop that I had and they hired me right away. I was never able to recreate the same atmosphere as the first one, but this one came close.

The owner and I had spoke about when I graduated, me driving across the country and stopping at coffee shops and writing about each of them and then creating it into a book. This was a dream of mine for so long and they were going to help me pay for it and search out the places and all of these amazing things.

Then, real life came into play and I realized I didn’t have anyone to pay my bills while I was gone on this escapade and I would have to pay for gas and hotels at the same time as making no money. Realistically, I was not sure how I could even pull this off.

I graduated.

I started applying to other jobs – 9-5 jobs that I could have health insurance and an actual pay check that could pay for bills. At this point, I was working multiple jobs and could just barely afford life.

Looking back I just think to myself, why the hell did I not do that? I should have went for it. It could have been an amazing book.

Maybe one day I will still do it.

Maybe.

 

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