An act of love

Boom-shaka-laka he says, and turns, keeps talking, good choice--more a mutter under his voice.  He is responding to my breakfast sandwich order. The woman next to him with the hair and eyes we would've called hipster ten years ago but is just Youth now is wringing her body, a posture you have to be near enough her to feel or sense rather than see.  Squirming.  Trying to contain her energy.  We used to call it wilen--trying to hold that feeling in.  They are jolly, inside-skin-sweating, barista-caffeinated in that contagious way that saturates me so completely I have to sit down and write about it.

To write, to just say: I witness, I see.  And also I guess, for some of us anyway: Yes, I also have been…

...A barista, a million 5 am mornings the slim shiver ice slap to the face brutal as breath in the morning coming in from the Bay.  Get the lights on and newspapers out for the Pines retiree locals who'll be here by 8.  Espresso grounds airborne or on your hands actually infuse your skin, that high-wired trigger volt there even if you don't drink, gotta go gotta go gotta move keeping going what to do nowwww.  Brown-eyed hippie boy and his broad shoulder townie friends, Natalie's Comfort Food blueberry muffin smells, how smells actually fog your glasses, December mornings walking in to Play it Again Sam's, start the slow drip 7am, senioritus and early-caffeinated-sobriety thirteen years ago in my college town.

I have been…

...I leave the rehab early this morning.  Two clients I used to work with, back.  One strung out again, one almost half a year clean.  The same jittery barista-body wringing-energy in them.  One from tweak, one from the joy, the life force, the vitality that is wordless but throttles through you in a rush of yes I can.

Hope is a funny thing, its wavers and disappearing acts, its suddens rushes and returns.

There are so many people in this coffee shop that the line doubles itself in front of the door.  Of all the things I have been hope is the most important of them all.  Boom-shaka-laka guy never doesn't use his barista high to connect with me, and every other customer, to give them a smile.  I remember that.  Each moment, which could be…an act of love.

In most moments, a choice.  In a million different things.  HOPE--which most finally is a thing to be...