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This coffee shop has the best ambiance and the worst Wifi. 

Sometime in the past week, the world turned into spring with the slightest hint of winter. It has been a week of endless studying, cold nights and one frustrating conversation after another. It has been a week that has tested me to the very limits of my capabilities for what is probably the first time ever.

It was an impulse decision that would lead me here tonight. I wasn’t expecting much when I made my way out of the cold and to the beckoning lights of the coffee shop, but it surprised me. A thermostat turned to a temperature that would usually be considered too warm and the background chatter of quiet conversation welcomed me, inviting me to stay a while. The coffee is bitter on my tongue, but it warms my hands and my heart.

There is an entire world out there beyond this, I know. On a Saturday night full of stars, somebody is falling in love for the first time. Someone is having their heart broken for the first time. Someone is enchanted by the gaze of a stranger across a crowded room, and someone is speaking the words on their mind and heart. Someone is probably just like me; watching and waiting and searching for answers to a million unasked questions. But in this moment, there is an entire world out there that doesn’t matter.

I sit alone with only my dreams to keep me company, along with words waiting to be put onto paper. It strikes me that perhaps I look strange to anyone who has been watching me as closely as I have been watching these strangers, but I’ve never been one to mind being alone—the curse and also the gift of introversion. I immerse myself into the conversation of a million people; it is rather curious to listen to strangers pouring out their life stories and the wishes of silenced hearts that they would ordinarily never dare to articulate. I wonder about the steps that brought them here tonight so that we would come to sit side-by-side in some alternate universe together.

And so the minutes tick by as I sit in the glow of a little coffee shop, a beacon of bright lights and cinnamon air, sparkling laughter and thoughtful hearts. And like a lighthouse in the darkest night, I find that maybe this night could not be more flawless.