General Fiction
This is a guest post by Untangled by Fazilat. Please see the author’s links if you enjoyed this piece.
There is something strangely comforting about cafés.
Not because of the coffee, though that certainly helps. I think it is because of the way so many little lives exist in the same room without ever really…
…touching.
Friends catching up after months. A couple sharing a dessert. Someone working against a deadline. Someone staring out of a window, waiting for a text.
I was there with people I loved, at a table loud with the kind of conversation where everyone interrupts everyone else. Stories overlapped. Someone laughed too loudly. Fries disappeared from the middle of the table. The smell of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air, warm and slightly bitter.
And then I saw her.
A waiter walked past carrying a chocolate brownie, still warm, with chocolate sauce running down its sides and a scoop of vanilla ice cream slowly collapsing beside it. He placed it on the table by the window.
The woman sitting there was alone.
She had a book open in front of her.
No phone.
No earphones.
No laptop.
Just the book.
She thanked the waiter without looking up. Took a small bite of the brownie. Took a sip of coffee. Turned the page.
And disappeared.
Not physically.
Just… elsewhere.
The café carried on around her. Cups clinked. Chairs scraped against the floor. The coffee machine hissed behind the counter. Someone burst into laughter. Conversations rose and fell around her.
She seemed completely unaware of any of it.
For those few minutes, whatever was happening in everyone else’s world simply didn’t matter.
And I couldn’t stop watching her.
I wondered what she was reading.
Maybe a murder she was trying to solve before the detective did. Maybe a love story she would think about on the way home. Maybe a woman from another century whose life felt strangely familiar. Maybe something so ordinary that it would mean nothing to anyone else.
I’ll never know.
And I think that’s what stayed with me.
Because there was something almost radical about watching someone be completely absorbed in something that didn’t need to be productive.
She wasn’t reading because she had to.
Nobody was going to grade her on those pages.
There was no deadline waiting at the end of the chapter. No notification to answer. No reason to be there except that she wanted to know what happened next.
How rarely do we allow ourselves that anymore?
To do something simply because we are curious.
To sit somewhere and give one thing our entire attention.
To be so interested in another world that, for a little while, ours can wait.
I went back to my own conversation, but I kept thinking about her.
Maybe this is one of the quiet gifts of reading.
Not that it makes us smarter. Not that it improves our vocabulary or helps us sound more interesting at dinner.
Maybe it is simply that, every once in a while, a book gives us somewhere to go.
And in going there, we return a little different.
We borrow someone else’s fears. We fall in love with people who never existed. We enter rooms we will never see and lives we will never live. We learn how someone else thinks, loves, grieves, hopes.
And somewhere along the way, without noticing, we become a little more ourselves.
Perhaps that is why I kept looking at the woman by the window.
I wasn’t wondering what book she was reading anymore.
I was wondering who she would be when she closed it.
And then, unexpectedly, I wondered about myself.
About all the books I haven’t read yet.
All the stories I haven’t entered.
All the little ways I might have changed if I had.
Maybe somewhere inside all those unread pages is a version of me I haven’t met yet.
Maybe that’s what we mean when we say we are becoming.
Not necessarily someone new.
Perhaps just someone we could have become all along.
Untangled by Fazilat is a writer with several works and articles that you can read online at her substack here. Please be sure to check out her other work there if you enjoyed this piece.
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