living is easy

One summer when I was in my early twenties, I worked for a cafe run by a cruel DJ slash drug dealer with an explosive temper. I was hired to cook and make coffee, two skillsets I decidedly did not have. Because the cafe was just starting out, the owner tried to offset paying the staff fairly by giving us unlimited access to free weed. Not surprisingly, the food was terrible and the drinks were worse, especially when made by me.

Men in suits would come and order their lattes and breakfast sandwiches. I would try to remember, in order, the following things — how to greet a customer, how to communicate about their coffee, how to add up the amounts necessary to request payment for their orders, and then how to use the till. This herculean effort would also include feigning peace with the concept of currency, ties, and the vastness of intercontinental trade networks required to bring coffee beans to our shop. I was bad at all of this.

In a final act of extraordinary incompetence, I would pretend to work the latte machine, often having to ask a colleague to press the buttons and pull the levers for me. On the unlucky occasion that we were both too stoned to figure it out, we would present the pairs of businessmen with cups of hot water shot through with coffee grounds, then bolt immediately to the back as though this would absolve us of our crimes against customer service and the noble art of being a barista.

At the time, I was also dating a man too old for me who grew many pot plants in his home. He would smoke me up to the level he was accustomed to, which was not a level I could perform at whatsoever. He would then put my extremely stoned self on a city bus and release me into the world, where I would spend the tiny amounts of money I had on secondhand dresses. I would forget to grocery shop and eat feta cheese by the handful out of his fridge while he talked about his ideas for American foreign policy. We were horrible together, finding solace in the backwards intimacy of hostile incompatibility preferred by those who aren’t ready for good love.

We would fuck and fight and send mean text messages. We would smoke pot and listen to hip hop music, and I would bike back and forth between these two places, the coffee shop run by the drug dealer and the home of my boyfriend (also a drug dealer). I’d stop in at my own home occasionally to feed my cats and not clean anything, and then head out again, into the pavement arteries tracing between my summer places. I’d go to the home of my friends, too, and that was when I was happiest, drinking like fish and yelling jokes over and at each other. Then I would go back to my boyfriend’s place, wondering what kind of mood he would be in when I got there, and why he sometimes reminded me of my mother. It would take me a long time to learn that familiarity is often a knife taking us straight to our earliest wounds.

But still, I loved that summer. I’d trace long meanderings down 15th avenue, stopping to smell roses and steal bouquets of flowers from the front lawns of unlucky gardeners. I’d listen to the newest albums on repeat through earbuds while biking through city parks, stopping to sweat and text and eat saskatoon berries from bushes. I had no money. I swam in the rivers. I was clueless and hot and young and in terrible pain. And wasn’t that exactly, come to think, what summer was for? Cheeks tight with the memory of recent laughter, my bike, me, and wherever I was headed to next.