Writing in the Window

The neighborhood cafés where you can sit for hours without a screen, without a schedule, and without anyone asking you to leave.

The Window Seat

There is a particular kind of café that exists in San Francisco and almost nowhere else. It is not the café where you go to be seen. It is not the café with the best coffee, or the fastest wifi, or the most Instagrammable interior. It is the café where you go to disappear for three hours.

The café I am thinking of has a window seat. It is not the best seat in the house — it is drafty in winter, and the afternoon sun hits it directly and makes the screen unreadable. But it is the seat where you can watch the street without being watched. The seat where you can write, or read, or simply stare out the window and think about nothing in particular.

I spent the first year of my sobriety in window seats. I was afraid of my apartment, which was full of the ghosts of the person I used to be. I was afraid of bars, obviously. I was afraid of parks, which at night were full of people drinking. So I went to cafés. I ordered a coffee, then a tea, then a sparkling water. I sat in the window seat and I wrote.

What I Wrote

I wrote about the people I saw. The man who walked his dog at the same time every morning, in a green jacket, with the same route. The woman who practiced tai chi in the park across the street, alone, at dawn. The couple who argued in front of the bakery every Tuesday, then kissed and made up in front of the bakery every Wednesday.

I wrote about the weather. San Francisco weather is subtle — it is never dramatic, never extreme. But it is always changing. The fog comes in at four. The sun breaks through at noon. The wind picks up at six. These small changes are the rhythm of the city, and writing them down was a way of learning to listen.

I wrote about the feeling of being sober in a city that drinks. The discomfort, the strangeness, the slow realization that being sober did not mean being excluded. It meant being present. It meant seeing the city as it actually was, not as the drink made it seem.

The Cafés

I won't name them. Not because they are secret — they are not — but because the café that is right for you is not the café that is right for me. The point is not the café. The point is the window seat. The point is the three hours. The point is the act of sitting down, ordering something that is not alcohol, and staying.

Find your window seat. It might be in a café in the Mission, or in the Outer Sunset, or in a neighborhood you haven't been to yet. It might be the one you walk past every day. The one that is always there, that you never noticed, because you were always in a hurry.

Stop being in a hurry. Sit down. Write something. Or don't write anything. Just watch the street and drink your coffee and remember that you are here, in this city, in this moment, and that is enough.