When I feel like this, all I want to do is sit in the coffeshop or my room all day and read. I definitely don’t want to work on an assignment for an elective. Or go to a night class I’m only taking because I had to.

I went to Starbucks to do some work. I have a certain Starbucks I like more dislike less than the other 50 Starbuckses in a five-block radius from my home (Yorkville is like that), and I managed to get one of the big soft purple chairs at the back.

There was a vaguely interesting-looking guy sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the shop, reading and drinking tea through a straw. He looked my age, maybe a bit younger, he had his feet slung over the side of the chair. I stole a few glances at him, but I didn’t even check to see what book he was reading. I think he looked at me a few times, cozied up with photocopied Intimate Journal of George Sand (What is it about cute boys that turn even the most independent women to mush?), which he of course didn’t know was the Intimate Journal of George Sand. I felt a little bit like we were reading together, only not. I just felt a little less lonely, somehow. The whole thing would have fallen apart if it were in any way acknowledged. Then he left.

A little while later, someone who may possibly be the most beautiful man I have ever spoken to asked if I minded if he took the chair opposite me. I don’t usually think men I see at Starbucks are attractive, but this guy was like an angel. He wasn’t the sort of pseudo-gritty/interesting kind of good looks I usually go for. He had a full beard and plain brown hair and a gentle face and kind eyes. I kept sort of sneaking glances at him from behind Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’m pretty sure he caught me almost crying at this one part where Kit Carson helps this poor Mexican woman who’d married a murderous American man. (I think I was crying because I was so happy something exciting was finally happening. Willa Cather always seems to start out slow. Really slow.) He probably thought I was weird. He probably didn’t know I thought he was dreamy.

The Lost in Translation soundtrack has been my lullaby since Friday. Everyone wants to be found.