D

uring the winter holidays, Augie’s Coffee
Roasters
of
Claremont,
California
is
overflowing with recent college graduates
reuniting, families stopping for a moment with babies
in strollers and young couples chatting over matcha,
oat milk lattes. The customers spill out to the tables of
the Packing House, a relic of the ancient Californian
citrus empire that’s been repurposed into a village
attraction, complete with artists’ lofts and a used
bookstore.
It’s a joyous scene — a busy one — and a testament
to a downtown that’s really come into itself over
the past decade. Claremont, my hometown, is a city
superficially similar to Ann Arbor, in terms of coffee
shop offerings and deliberately cultivated, upper-
middle class quirk. After all, all happy college towns
are alike.
I found myself at Augie’s not to meet old high
school friends or catch up with extended family,
but rather to seek out a small bit of normalcy in the
strange, boneless time of year that is winter break as
a college student. After a semester of a meticulously
scheduled Google Calendar, a planner overflowing
with deadlines and overly-optimistic aspirations,
friends’ birthday parties and Rick’s Thursdays,
moving back into my mom’s house for a few weeks
tends to feel weird, for lack of a better word. The
structure I’ve built around myself in Ann Arbor
dissipates, and there’s the constant, uneasy feeling
of falling backwards in time, the hovering fear that
without a booked schedule and my college friends
around me, I’ll revert back to my 17-year-old self — a
terrifying prospect.
Coffee shops, however, are familiar territory.
Having spent the majority of the past three and
half years buying overpriced coffee with most of
my minimal income, using the flimsy justification
that the caffeine will power me through the essay of
the moment, I know my way around these spaces. I
know how to be myself — the college-aged version of
myself, that is — in coffee shops, whether they are in
Michigan or California.
So, I swapped out my living room couch for Augie’s,
and set up shop with my book of the moment —
“Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett — at a wobbly
table in the interior of the Packing House, adjacent to
Augie’s storefront.
Surrounded by the chaos of happy reunifications, I
was particularly conscious of my solitude. So, my relief
was palpable when I made the discovery that I had a
lone comrade in my reading pursuits — a blonde boy
sitting diagonal from me, buried in an unidentifiable
paperback. He seemed utterly undisturbed by the
goings-on around him, absorbed in some alternate
world in the pages of his beat-up novel.
We were sitting facing each other, yet at a safe
enough distance that I managed to sneak glances in
his direction, intrigued by my fellow reader. What
was he so engrossed in? Did he also feel self-conscious
at sitting alone while laughter rang around us?
I pulled out my phone to check Instagram and
was immediately ashamed of myself — my reading
companion would surely never be so superficial as
to put aside his literature for the banality of social
media. Several minutes later, however, I caught
him setting down his book spine-up on the table to
scroll through his phone for a few minutes, and was
reassured. We were kindred souls, I reasoned: both

big fans of reading and good literature, yet not so
self-righteous that we were above the distractions of
social networks. He got me, I got him.
My companion had to be somewhere in my age
range, had the look of an older college student or
recent grad and seemed like someone also trying to
get some breathing space from his family over the
holidays. He was blonde and clean-cut, so I figured
he was either an economics major or beginning his
studies at dental school. Not the most breathtakingly
handsome man I’d ever seen, but definitely workable
material. We’d get along, I speculated, and though we
probably wouldn’t have the same music taste, I could
see him wanting to talk about politics or check out
new independent films. He’d get along great with my
dad.
For an hour, we sat as such, me buried in
“Commonwealth,” and him in his respective reading
pursuit. Customers came and went — a loud woman
with neck tattoos vacated the table to my left in favor
of a young father, whose toddling offspring attached
herself to any and all passersby. I smiled, and out of
the corner of my eye, caught him smiling at the same
moment.
Suddenly, there came the worst possible betrayal
— I looked up from a particularly engrossing chapter
to realize that my companion had vanished, leaving
behind an empty chair and table. The dad and child
were still to my left, as were the loud, grad students
behind me, but his place was undeniably vacant.
What disloyalty! Such treachery! We’d built a future
together in the hour that had passed in Augie’s — and
this boy had the nerve to throw it all to the wind!
Only now sitting truly alone and feeling quite

jilted — but also rather amused — at my evaporated
fantasies, did I allow myself to float down to reality.
Sure, it was the idea of it. Of course, it was, it always
is, right? The idea that buying a new top will fix all
my problems, the idea of the perfect internship in
a big city and the idea of the guy in the coffee shop.
The ideas that always tend to turn out the same way
— the top predictably ends up being just a top, the
perfect internship inevitably ends up being at least
80 percent busy work. The guy leaves the coffee shop
before anything ever begins.
It’s the idea that college has made me more
educated, thoughtful and self-confident — worlds
away from the insecure 17-year-old that frequented
this same coffee shop four years — a lifetime —ago.
The self who breezes through her hometown on short
visits before moving on to bigger and better things.
A self who has perfected herself in every possible
aspect — overcome all her flaws, a self who no man
would (ever) turn down — or even, god forbid, fail to
approach in the neighborhood coffee shop.
I told myself he probably had awful breath. Or
maybe he was studying finance and would have ended
up to be one of those men who would advise me on my
401k within the first few minutes of a conversation.
So caught up was I in my new justification that I
almost missed the blond guy returning to his seat —
he’d only gone for a coffee refill.
We read together, sitting at our separate tables, for
another two hours, before parting ways. This time,
it was I who left first and who neglected to bid him
farewell. I could have talked to him, I suppose, but
what would have been the use of that? It was only ever
just the idea of it.

3B

Wednesday, January 8, 2020 // The Statement
3B

BY MEGHANN NORDEN-BRIGHT, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
The idea of it

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

I thought I’d aged out of this years ago. I’m sitting criss-cross-applesauce in my apartment while my roommate
straightens my hair. The brush catches my hair knots and pulls my head back like the boys in my elementary
school used to do, though it wasn’t because they liked me.
The hair situation isn’t going as planned. My curls are beginning to spring back from stress sweat, either caused
by the fact that I’m going to a dance with a stranger or the fear that I won’t fit in with the crowd. I have less than
20 minutes to figure out how I can turn my curly hair, acne and glasses into something remotely resembling a