Sophomore year of high school, I became addicted to Italian-style coffee--white chocolate mochas in particular. First, they were delicious. A steaming cup of creamy white chocolate and coffee with an aftertaste of buttery flavor. It’s mixture of half hot chocolate and half espresso straddled the precarious line between adult and childhood in a way that I maneuvered myself that year. That devilish espresso teased the naïve and angelic hot chocolate drinker out of me with an illicit, unspoken “Adults Only” sign.

The maturity of a coffee cup in hand in high school was a figurative baby blanket for me. It was a protection from the cruelty of a bunch of sweaty, acne-faced teenagers crammed under one hormone-muddled roof trying to accumulate enough facets to create an identity. Short boys took up wide-legged cowboy shuffles. Blonde girls picked up flat-irons and designer bags. I had my coffee armor.

The next logical step to stepping into my Mature Coffee Connoisseur identity seemed to be observing the culture that went along with the cup. At first I could only glimpse into the elusive world of the Mature Coffee Connoisseurs through the drive-through window of my mother’s car as we would pick up coffee to go.

Distance surely made my heart grow fonder that day. The imagined air was probably incense scented. The imagined customers wore black plastic glasses with thick lenses to hold in their deep thoughts and poured Woolfian prose into black mole-skin notebooks with their ball-point pens. The baristas were elevated to the status of the Three Magis bearing gifts of coffee to sustain the prophets of a new generation. I didn’t know anyone who actually frequented a coffeehouse, so they could be whatever I wanted to be. So, they had to have secure identities and exciting lives to which my poor high-school heart could cling.

Cling to it I did. I bought black plastic frames and Converse tennis shoes. I layered junky t-shirts with blazers. I bought black and white composition notebooks which I carried in 100% cotton bags covered with pins bearing witty sayings and political messages. I assumed an identity I liked, an identity that was an amalgamation of nothing deriving from nowhere but from a deep and misguided love for coffee and its American culture. I was someone!

I walked through the glass doors to the tinkling sound of a door chime. Mediocre art probably done in a college nude drawing class lined the brightly covered walls. The smell was, obviously, coffee beans and not incense. I walked up to the counter and studied the pastry case to steel myself for the hipness of the encounter with the barista.

He was very cool and very Three Magi serving-like, I thought, thinking I could use that very line in a later piece of writing. His hair was long and rather unkempt, he had a goatee and wore a used, tight, ringer t-shirt underneath his apron.

I put the change in the tip jar and picked up my coffee at the other end of the bar, disappointed in my first exchange with a Barista. Even though he was not a Mature Coffee Connoisseur, he didn’t even ask if I had written a screenplay.

There I was in my black Converse with the pink laces and blazer clutching my coffee-cup and surely exuding some sort of I’m-a-writer pheromone that would help them recognize me as their own. No one came rushing over. I sat down and took out my notebook. Discreetly, I looked at the other patrons there. A fat mother and her eyeliner aficionado daughter sipping whipped-cream topped concoction and reading books. An old man nodding off in the chair by the fireplace. And my people! A college-aged hipster in wire-rimmed glasses and a scruffy beard typing probably at about the speed of one minute an hour and staring out the window with his brow pointedly furrowed. A girl in a tattered peasant skirt and white-people dreadlocks chewing on a pen and kicking her hemp bag with her Conversed foot.

I drank the white mocha. By the time I looked up, the college boy and the hippie girl were gone. I didn’t hear them leave.