Before the Coffee Gets Cold
On the things we’d go back to, if we could
There is a café in Tokyo — or so the story goes — where you can travel back in time.
The rules are simple and merciless. You must sit in a specific seat. You can only return to moments that have already happened. You cannot change anything about the present, no matter what you do or say. And you must return before the coffee gets cold.
I’ve been thinking about where I would go.
Not to the argument. Not to the apology I gave too many times, or the one I never received. Not to the moment she said her life wasn’t easy either and something in me quietly broke. Those moments I have replayed enough. I know every word. I know exactly where I went wrong and exactly where she did and I know, now, that knowing changes nothing.
No. If I had one cup of coffee, I know exactly where I’d take it.
A metro station.
Evening. My friend and I coming back from a day out — where, I can’t remember, which is the kind of thing grief does, erases the facts and keeps the feeling. What I remember is the platform. The trains arriving and leaving. The particular arithmetic of we should really go that kept failing to add up to goodbye.
We missed the first train on purpose, I think. Neither of us said so. We just kept talking, and it came and went, and we looked at each other and kept talking. Then the second. Then somewhere around the third or fourth we stopped counting and just — stayed. Giggling about something. One thing leading to another the way conversations do when you’re with your friends, when the thread between you is so easy to follow that you forget you were supposed to be somewhere else.
It got late. Eight o’clock. There was a small anxiety about it, the way there is when you’re happy and you can feel the happiness becoming limited — the city getting dark, the platform emptying, the knowledge that hostel was waiting and hostel did not have her in it.
We burst our stomachs laughing at something. I can’t remember what. I remember the laughing. Eventually we got on our trains. We had to. That’s the thing about metro stations — the trains keep coming, and at some point you have to get on one. I didn’t know, standing on that platform, that we were already in the last chapter.
Here is what I understand about the café in Tokyo, about the rules of going back: You cannot change anything.
At first this seems like the cruelty of the premise. What is the point of returning if you cannot fix what broke? Why sit across from someone, or stand beside them on a platform, if you have to come back to the same world you left?
But I think that is exactly the point.
Because the moments we most want to return to are not always the ones we want to fix. Sometimes they are simply the ones we did not hold carefully enough — the evenings we were present in but not fully, the goodbyes we said quickly because we assumed there would be more of them, the trains we finally boarded without knowing we were leaving something behind on the platform.
Going back to fix the argument would not give me what I’m looking for. The argument was already the end of something. What I want is earlier than that — back before either of us knew to be careful, when the thread between us was easy and we could miss five trains without it meaning anything except that we weren’t ready to stop talking yet.
I want to go back and know it. To be there, laughing until my stomach hurt, and understand — this is one of the good ones. Hold it. Don’t rush to the train.
The coffee goes cold eventually. That is the other rule.
You cannot stay. Whatever warmth you return to, whatever moment you climb back inside — it has a limit. The cold comes, and you come back, and the world is exactly as you left it. She is still gone from it. The platform is just a platform. The trains run on schedule.
I think about this and I think it is the truest thing the book says about grief and memory and the people we lose to the quieter endings, the ones that happen in increments until one day you realise there are no more trains to miss together.
You cannot keep the coffee warm. You cannot stay inside the good evening forever. You can only go back, be there completely for however long you have, and then return to the life that continued without them.
I don’t know if she thinks about that platform.
I don’t know if she remembers missing the trains, or what we were laughing about, or whether the evening meant to her what it meant to me. That’s the other thing grief does — it makes you uncertain about shared memories. Whether something was mutual. Whether the thread you felt was real or just yours.
But I was there. I know how it felt. I know I stayed on that platform longer than I needed to because I wasn’t ready, and I know I laughed until it hurt, and I know that by the time I finally got on my train I was still smiling.
If I had one cup of coffee, I’d take it back to that platform. I wouldn’t say anything different. I wouldn’t warn myself. I wouldn’t try to hold onto it any tighter than I did.
I’d just miss a few more trains.
And this time, I’d know why.
love reading your posts 💗