The flowers were the first thing she saw.
They were sitting out on the cobblestone street, still in plastic planters, next to the cafe door. There was no obvious place for them to go. Were they just going to sit in the planters on the street? Or was there a yard nearby where they would be planted?
“Regular milk or soy?” the barista asked.
Jarred from her thoughts, Vanda turned her head away from the flowers to answer.
“Regular, thanks.”
“Do you have our rewards card?”
After pressing her lips together and shaking her head, the barista took one of the rewards cards from the little card holder, stamped it, and handed it to her. She took it with a twinge of guilt, knowing that she would never get a second stamp.
“I’ll bring it out when it’s ready,” he said with a smile.
Vanda nodded and took a seat in one of the wire chairs under the awning adorned with yellow-orange dangling lights. The sun was half set, creating a bright glow as far as the eye could see, and so the dangling lights gave off a redundant glow.
The lights were there, they were glowing, but they weren’t really necessary. Vanda felt like that in this country.
She had spent the last two years traveling through every inch of this place – through the countryside, the cities, and the suburbs – to find each one of them different in beauty and landscape, but the same in disappointment. Not because they weren’t charming, but because every place reacted to her exactly the same. She was consistently a faceless, soulless tourist. It never changed.
She just went from one little plastic container to the next, just like those flowers on the cobblestones – never planted.
“Vanilla latte,” the barista said, putting the long glass on the table.
Vanda looked at it, the milk on top bleeding into the dark, rich coffee, but not fully mixed. She sipped through the straw to taste the coffee, bitter and nutty; then pulled the straw up to taste only the sweet and creamy milk. Every vanilla late was the same in every city. It was always just a different level of bitter, a different level of sweet.
She stabbed the straw through the ice into the cup, the milk cutting through the coffee. Then she stirred it until all the elements were completely blended together into one.
And that’s when it tasted perfect. That’s when the foreign cobblestone streets weren’t so rough, and conversations in the background that she didn’t understand weren’t so alien. And for one cup of coffee, she was part of a cafe in the countryside, the same as everyone else. Not a tourist, not an alien, but a patreon of the moment.
She held onto that feeling, knowing that this feeling of home would be over as soon as the coffee was gone.
Savoring her coffee, she looked at the little unpotted plants. Yes, they were beautiful. Fully bloomed, their petals soft and long, flourishing despite not having a home of their own.
She hoped that she was the same.