Your view in every diner in NYC.

As your day comes to it’s close, and your all-nighter comes to it’s opening, Bwog offers you a late post to distract yourself with. Our Arts Editor, not so unfamiliar with procrastination himself hopes this story will fit nicely between the latest Buzzfeed video and your next Parks and Recreation tribute.

I get there around 4:30, just in time to catch the sunset. I am shown to my booth. Maria looks exactly like she did when I first came in: a titian haired grandma in a 50s pink polo. I like to think she’ll stay that way for years, for generations of customers. I hope so anyway. As always, I ask Maria if she remembers me remembers me. As always, she passes me my menu with only customary politeness and says, “Of course, dear.”

There is nothing at all special about this diner. The seats are tacky, the silverware greasy, the menu unremarkable. It is every diner in New York City. There is the mirror, massive, behind the counter. Old wood, chiseled and polished, gorgeous, it’s an old school bar mirror, the silver behind the glass a tarnished. (Brought in for an abandoned renovation maybe? Or just left behind from a failed former business.) But then every diner in New York has something special. Tom’s has Seinfeld. (Could never stand Tom’s. So few Columbia traditions and I had to hate one. Can’t help it: the booths are too crowded and the fish too questionable.) There is nothing special about this diner, except that it belongs to me.

I found it back when I needed a place that belonged to me, the second week of school. It was just too much: the parties, the people, all so sure of themselves. And then the classes, which got so hard so quickly. I needed to get away. I needed the space to think. So I went for a walk, and on that walk I worried that I was going to drop out in my first month, and I worried about four years without friends, and I worried about who I was supposed to be since I clearly wasn’t the smart one anymore. I walked, down through Harlem, then along Central Park, before turning deep into the Upper East Side. The more I walked, and worried, the sillier my worries felt, until all of a sudden I wasn’t worried at all, and I found myself outside of a genuine New York diner. And I came in, and things seemed like they were going to be okay.

Maria comes around to refill my coffee, and I try to check my nostalgia. Nostalgia, in my experience, is a tricky thing to balance, falling too easily into gloom. I check my watch: 6:00. Plenty of time.

That first night, I imagined coming to the same spot again and again, and for a moment felt every one of those future selves, peering through time. Now, in my senior year, I can’t, hard as I try, remember where I was sitting that first time. I haven’t ever felt the same sense of self connection, but tonight, looking around, I swear I can see them, not so much ghosts of the past, as wisps, only visible out the corner of my eye.

Here in this booth alone there are a few of them. Across from me is the boy who came back for the first time. He was a romantic sort, had just started carrying a notebook with him, and was intent on writing a note for every one of us who visited the diner: addressed to the Society of Gentlemen who bear my name… He was the only one who ever wrote a note.

There, slumped in the corner, is the poor broken soul who had tried his hand at Spec. It had been alright, for a while, until the initiation. What he did to that goat… I can still remember the bleating, that horrible bleating. If only we had just killed it.

And next to me, hands twitching and devil horns on his forehead. Halloween, first year. He has just made up his mind to transfer.

7:15 now. I wave Maria away when she tries to refill me. This was actually the first place I tried coffee. I drank until I had a headache. It was horrible, lasted all day. I think that was here anyway.

There, over on the counter, is the little wisp who has just decided not to transfer, a bit surprised, but so happy. I remember that day perfectly. It had just rained. About a week before, I had finally told my friends what I was planning. I knew they would hate me, but I felt more every day that I was lying to them. They didn’t hate me. Jarrod asked to see my application and then Sarah came in, and all of a sudden there was an impromptu transfer-app party, complete with music. I had come to the diner to look over the essays we’d worked on together. They were terrible, an incompatible mix of different styles devolving into inside jokes. Reading them over I knew, there was no way I ever wanted to leave.

7:45 now. I’m counting time awfully slow. No reason to be nervous, I tell myself. The woman in the yellow raincoat is here today. I always wonder about her. Year round she wears that coat, with no mind to the weather.

The wisps are paced further apart from there. It just got to be too much of a trek, coming all the way out to the Upper East Side. I was too busy too, with friends, with school, that ill-fated Spec adventure, the three majors before creative writing. Honestly, I just didn’t need to come up anymore. Not until…

Oh god. There he is, in the corner there, by the window. Heartbroken, collapsed into himself, the breakup only a few hours before.

Thank God I never took her here.

My hands have started to sweat. 8:30. Still a while yet.

Time is passing quick. The wisps are filling the room, paced further and further apart, and why not? In a way, I guess, this is their going away party, my fond farewell. They fill the booths and the bar, coming in from the street to take their seat, writing and thinking, and ordering so many milkshakes, so much coffee. Regulars are here to see them off. There’s the old couple that caused poor little breakup boy so much extra distress; the man in the blue suit, who I always like to pretend is a retired congressman; the girl with the blue hair, completely unaware of how many times I had fallen in love with her. I saw her on the subway once.

It’s 10:00, and I’ve made a horrible mistake. I’m not ready. We’re not ready. How can I let all of this, all of them, die? And for what? She won’t understand, not really. I’ll either try to let it go, or I’ll hold it over her, and we’ll fight. It’s all just another breakup waiting to happen.

Where will I go then? I won’t be able to come back here. It won’t be my diner any more. It will be where I took that one girl that one time. It will be one of places where she didn’t understand, where we fought, or worse, where it all seemed to be going so well, where talked, where we kissed. When I look around I won’t see me, I’ll see us, and everything that went wrong. Another date with another girl.

This diner is too important for that. Maybe not to anyone else in the world, maybe not even to Marie the waitress, but to me.

10:30. I should just go. She’s running late. I am always running late. I don’t actually know if she does.

It’s the stupidest little thing. Later, I won’t be able to turn it into a story for friends, because of how stupid it is, not to mention how much of asshole it shows me to be (how have I always run late?). I don’t know if she runs late. And it’s the stupidest little thing, but I am just so excited to find out if she does. It’s enough, not that I don’t know something about her, but that I’m excited to learn. I’m excited to learn everything about her, desperate almost, in a way I haven’t felt since really those first few freshmen romances, and in a way I hadn’t thought I’d feel again. She’s excited to learn about me too, in the same way, I think. I remember now. That’s why I invited her.

10:33. I look up and see her walking in, and she smiles at me, and there’s not a ghost in sight.

There’s nothing special about this diner. There’s nothing special about this diner except that it’s about to belong to her.

Every diner you’ve ever been to, via Shutterstock