Rothko

I’m in a coffee shop down the street from me that feels oddly empty and quiet. It isn’t empty. Every table here has one occupant each, and I just noticed that I’m the only woman. The walls are large and bare and mostly white except for a scene painted on them in one color with no variation—a sort of tomato orange. The scene is solid and has distinct corners. Part of the mural is of an abandoned warehouse with broken windows, which takes up 1/3rd of one of the walls, and the rest of the walls are painted with a silhouette of telephone poles and connecting wires that cross and sag along the rest of the walls.

I can sort of see it—an urbanite wants to open a coffee shop, so she gets a retail space sort of in the hip neighborhood but on side streets so she can afford it. She brings in an artistic consultant. He comes into the room, puts his hand to his chin and after a moment says, “I’ve got it. I see white. I see a red—no, orange—no, red-orange. I see [dramatic pause] telephone poles. Rows and rows of telephone poles.”

I’m sitting by the wall by the cracked-up orange warehouse and my shirt, oddly, is the same red as the paint. It looks planned. Everyone is quiet here. Most of the men look like they came home from whatever work wherever, ate something and fell asleep in front of the television for 15 hard minutes, then woke up with a start and thought “I have so much shit to do. I have to get out of this apartment.” Two of them are holding up their heads by resting their chin in a hand and an elbow on the table. I kind of wish my cell phone would ring.

All the men have white coffee cups except the guy with the hair straight up and the cowgirl boots. There are large, bulbous lamps on each table that look like trees from The Lorax. I’m drinking a lemon soda called Bubble Up! And sitting in a chair covered in gold-flecked plastic. There’s definitely some sort of 50’s theme going on here.

All of us are here for company and we know it. There are five tables against each wall and behind us and behind the light from the Lorax Trees, orange telephone wires connect us at the shoulder or head, and I think about wires. Telephones with hearty coiled cords and grounded computers and the speaker in my car with a loose and unreliable wire "I'm wired," how obsolete telephone poles already are. I think of how 50’s homemakers cried the day a husband wheeled the first television into the living room because otherwise, there had very little access to the outside world, except in books and radio and imagination.

The tables are full here because our own walls are not covered in orange telephone poles and we need something that isn’t what we’re surrounded by all the time, even though we’ll stare at our screens and books like I have for over eight hours already just today. And we need people—silent is fine, just to be around more people. In the same room with them. Six Dells. Three Macs. Four Razors. Us. We probably won’t talk.