Student Bloggers

My love affair with coffee didn’t take hold until I headed to college. Crossing state lines (or, in my case, multiple state lines) came with a culture change; growing up in Smalltown, Wisconsin, carrying a Starbucks cup was more of a fashion statement than anything else, but Nashville takes their coffee seriously. Like really seriously.

As I adjusted to life in a city, I also found my love for sipping strangely-named caffeinated beverages and, more importantly, my love for the more often times than not hole-in-the-wall places they come from. Nothing interrupts the rut that can become schoolwork better than disappearing for an afternoon in a coffee shop most people don’t even know exists.

I like drinking coffee, don’t get me wrong, but I have found what I’m also drawn to, maybe even more so than the drink itself, is the atmosphere that accompanied that overpriced $5 brew. With my phone set to airplane mode and headphones in, it’s like a temporary pause in time to let the world pass by while I sit, helplessly unnoticed and become an observer in life rather than an active participant. It’s not a role, as a general rule, I don’t willingly accept but coffee shops prove to be the exception. Others use these coveted locations as a site for social gatherings, but I prefer to succumb to my latte addiction in solidarity, lost in my own world as I write or journal. 

Nothing has changed since I left for New Zealand.

The shops are different than my usuals in Nashville (Jam, Sam & Zoe’s and Atmology) and the coffee is now unfiltered, but I still seek out those quiet coffee shops to settle in with my thoughts and escape reality for a while, despite the fact that my reality in Wellington is better than I could have ever hoped for.

What I decided is this: It’s easy to love a place when the sun is warming your skin from cloudless, blue skies and birds are singing songs in faultless harmony and you’re out exploring- biking down long forgotten roads, discovering hidden chasms and gorges, trekking up mountains for the sole reason embracing the stunning view.

Anyone can do that; that kind of love is easy to give.

But when you walk into a small café that you didn’t even know existed until just moments before with nothing but a few dollars; when you sit at a table, alone, with just a book or a journal in front of you, pretending WiFi and iPhones are not superior; when you allow hours to pass by you unnoticed and your mind is filled with nothing but scraps of poetry that run off the edge of the world; when all of those things overtake you in a storm that provides not chaos but tranquility and you are inexplicably content, that is when the word ‘foreign’ shifts its definition into something that more closely resembles ‘home.’

These quiet coffee shops, the ones that don’t get so much as a second glance from those walking past on the street, they mean you are not a visitor just passing through, not a tourist checking items off of a bucket list found on Pinterest, but rather you are living in a place. You are consenting for it to open your eyes to distant and off-away ideas and as your change and grow, that place grows with you, becoming a sort of tattoo etched into your skin, a road map of sorts showing not where you can go, but rather where you’ve been. 

The allure of quiet coffee shops and traveling to foreign countries is one in the same- not to show off or gain Instagram followers, but to reflect on what truly matters and settle into your identity in its purest form.

(PS- This was written at Enigma while drinking gourmet hot chocolate and listening to One Republic’s Dreaming Out Loud… happiness in its simplest form.)