Coffee shops have become strange little waiting rooms. Everyone is technically together, but most people are doing their best impression of being somewhere else.
Near the counter, a guy is waiting for his coffee when he notices a woman a few feet away. He looks at her; she eventually looks at him, and through the kind of terrible timing that probably deserves its own scientific study, neither catches the other.
Then the barista calls out a name that bears almost no resemblance to whatever is written on the cup. She laughs. He laughs. Their eyes finally meet, and for a few seconds the universe has basically done everything short of hiring somebody to introduce them.
Neither one says anything.
She looks at her phone. He looks at his, and within seconds two people who were just laughing at the exact same thing are standing six feet apart pretending they have somewhere more interesting to be.
Her drink comes first, and as she walks toward the door she looks back toward the counter for a second. He doesn’t notice because, naturally, this is the exact moment he has decided to become interested in croissants.
Thirty seconds later his coffee comes, and he leaves too.
If you were sitting in the corner watching the whole thing, you probably wouldn’t think anything of it because technically nothing happened. Nobody got rejected, nobody embarrassed themselves, and nobody went home with a story about the weird person at the coffee shop who couldn’t take a hint.
Two people ordered coffee and left, which happens a few million times a day.
But I’ve started wondering how often something else almost happened.
I don’t even mean some great love story. Maybe they would have talked for thirty seconds and realized they had absolutely nothing to say to each other. Maybe he’s annoying, and she would have been looking for an escape before her coffee was ready. They never got far enough to find out.
There have been plenty of times when I’ve noticed someone and thought about saying something, then immediately started running through all the reasons I probably shouldn’t. She might be busy. She might not want to talk. I don’t want to misread being friendly as being interested, and I definitely don’t want to become the guy she texts her friends about before I’ve even made it back to my car.
So most of the time I leave people alone, and lately I’ve started wondering how many other people are making the exact same decision.
Because once you start paying attention, you see versions of that coffee shop everywhere. You see people around each other all day long, and everybody seems to be doing this little calculation in their head about whether saying something would be welcome.
The strange part is that there really isn’t a good way to know, because what would probably tell you whether someone wants to talk is usually talking to them.
Somehow we’ve gotten to the point where we want to know somebody wants to talk before we actually talk to them.
And there has to be some point between the guy who won’t leave somebody alone and the guy who never says hello, and lately it feels like a lot of us aren’t quite sure where that point is anymore.
And when I think about it, some of the best conversations I’ve had probably started when I wasn’t particularly looking for one. Somebody says something while you’re waiting for a flight or sitting at a bar; you answer mostly because you’re being polite, and ten minutes later you’re talking like you’ve known each other longer than ten minutes. You didn’t give them permission to start the conversation because you didn’t even know you wanted to have it yet.
That’s what makes all of this so tricky. Somebody can interrupt you without actually bothering you, but we’ve gotten so careful about not bothering each other that we may have stopped interrupting each other too.
Which makes me think about the two people in the coffee shop again. Maybe she really did want to be left alone, and if he had said something, she would have smiled politely and gone right back to her phone. That happens too.
But maybe he makes a joke about the barista getting her name wrong, she laughs again, and they talk until one of them realizes they’ve been standing there holding a coffee that’s getting cold. Maybe it goes somewhere, and maybe it doesn’t, but that’s the funny thing about conversations with strangers. You usually don’t know whether you wanted one until somebody starts one.
