Another rainy night, and another dingy Café filled with smoke and the odor of its innumerable unwashed patrons; a room of 5-‘O-Clock shadows and long coats, all hiding from each other in mugs of bad coffee under the same dim, urine colored light.
     Most of them were by themselves, shrunken in their collars and playing it cool as if they were the only ones in the room. Others sat in small clusters, hunched over their tables and quietly discussing life as if their stories were some secret entrusted to them by a higher power. The others in the huddle would play along, listening intently to the hushed whispers of the speaker, taking in every mundane detail and never even pausing for a moment to think, “What the hell am I doing here, listening to the sob stories of a man no different than me?”
     I suppose the same men meet in the same place every night at the same time to listen to these mindless accounts for a reason; a single factor that ties them all together: the need for comfort.
     Those who loiter here in groups do so in order to assure each other that everyone else is just as sick of the same old everyday American dream as they are. Each sad huddle reinforces the immobilized unrest of those who take a part of it, building a fellowship off of bad coffee and pointless complaints, yet within these fellowships, there is no change. Each group discusses the same idea from night to night, and yet they never make an effort to change the situation they are in. They remain enclosed in this sad little Café, long after the filthy glass door bangs shut behind them.
     So what about the loners, the men who come to this morbid scene and stare at the steam coming from their drink as it mixes with the tobacco haze just above their heads? Perhaps they just come to stare down the poorly-papered, nicotine-stained walls as they unwind from the overpowering monotony that is the outside world. Then again, maybe they are more like me, coming in the door to marvel at the tired grounds of society that filter in every night to gripe under the same yellowed, flickering bulb. Not wanting to know the answer, I push aside my cup of cold sludge and rise to the door, the sad Café’s gateway to the driving rain outside, a portal dimly illuminated by a solitary neon lie of “OPEN”.