My single best shot was a cappuccino.
It was warm by the counter, and the
steam from the machine spun dizzily
across the room, sticky summer heat
and striped shorts, and swinging ponytails,
it felt like Christmas and cocoa and jumpers. There
was a line past the pastries and I waited behind
a Mets Baseball Cap with a slender blonde occasionally
fondling his waist. I watched a fly dance over the
baguettes. Mets Baseball Cap was turning on his
tablet and asking the arm attached to his waist about
the free wifi, and ordering a whole wheat muffin with
his debit card. I held Tolstoy in large print in my right hand,
and changed my name for the fumbling barista that stood
with a baffled smile and a Sharpie grasped in his left hand.

My wifi password’s twenty digits long,
a slur of unconnected letters and numbers
that my dad can shout from the file folders
under the cable box if you want it, and I can
pull a twenty from a pair of jeans in the
laundry hamper if I haven’t used it on books
for my English class yet this week, because I
really love to read old classics at midnight sitting in the
corridor of faint light next to the humming fridge in my
oversized sweaters, developing my irregular eating habits,
lengthy verses and uncensored thighs.

I drank an Espresso at three yesterday and puked
before I missed the bus. I doubled over and heaved
streams of milky brown and thought of skipping my
first class because my stomach was lighting flames
across my chest and burning holes in my brain.
It is difficult to write my English paper when
heavy pools of cream slide along the edges of
my throat, and all I can think of is my history teacher
replaying the assassination of Kennedy until I can see a
silhouette of his upturned face under my eyelids. The kids in
my class cover their eyes but I can’t stop staring as the
bullet skims his jaw, and ricochets off his skull, and I always
wonder if he could feel the pain like we can.

Sometimes I think that my math teacher moves in circles.
He drinks black in tall porcelain mugs, the thick spools
sliding like tar along the edges of his lips and dampened
overlapping rings wetting the edges of stacks of paper.
He tells us that we are growing up too fast. I do not feel old
and I do not feel young, though I do feel both simultaneously.
He is recurrence: in his sets of ties, and hourly breaks,
incessant cycles of coffee and weekly grading with
red pen highlighting the sides of his hands; I am
Kennedy’s bullet, Tolstoy’s revolution, and the coffee shop.

There used to be a Buddhist monk on the side of the
subway platform by my street, who sat cross-legged,
with waxy pupils shifting under heavy eyelids and
bare feet pressing against the cold, callous bricks.
From the street, his thin image folded in between
January’s snowfall and the creases on his palms
reminded me of the dulled pages of newspapers,
the unclassifieds lying open against my warm morning
cup, as I try to comprehend another string of weary
headlines and distant names. It is then that I remember
I only pray with my eyes open.

I saw Mets Baseball Cap on the C line last week.
He got in two cars down and I felt the side of my ear
heat up at his lopsided stare. I allowed myself a small
glance; he was carrying two long duffel bags across his
shoulder, wrinkled brown paper bag- probably a muffin - in
his left, and a mocha with a green sleeve in his right. He
raised an eyebrow. As the subway began to move,
my mind was pulsing with the sour extremities of caffeine,
and the rhythmic intersecting tracks, cars lurching
on either side like gunshots. If he was also thinking about
cappuccinos and old baguettes and muffins and
baristas with green caps and generic nametags and the
lifting veil of steam around the checkered tables, and if
we are connected by steel wire and glass door and tired
reflections of tight suits and pencil skirts and stained sleeves
and twenty seven three-digit avenues, then maybe:

I will always be in two places at once.