One Shot Romance - A Collection of Short Stories

Coffeeshop Soundtrack

                                          Coffeeshop Soundtrack

She is love and she is all I need. She's all I need...

She sits by herself, sipping her coffee and looking outside at the cloudy Portland sky. She's sitting by the window. She always sits by the window. 

Four years ago, I found this little coffeeshop by the water's edge. It was surrounded by big chain restaurants, like Subway and Qdoba, hidden amongst their popularity. It was no wonder I had never seen it before.

I found it back when I was a freshman in college. I was visiting my roommate's house for a school break, because it made no sense to fly all the way to San Francisco for three days. We had been walking to Subway to get some lunch, when I walked by the window to this small, independently owned coffeeshop and I saw her.

She was just sitting by the window, staring outside like she always did. I remember her vividly. She was wearing a light blue dress with a white cardigan. I remember the color of her dress because it matched her eyes perfectly, and I could never forget those eyes. 

Your voice was the soundtrack of my summer. Do you know you're unlike any other? You'll always be my thunder. And I said, your eyes are the brightest of all the colors...

I remembered telling my friend I wanted to get coffee after we ate. What I really wanted to do was to talk to this incredibly beautiful girl in the coffeeshop. But when we came back after our lunch, she was gone and, seemingly, so were my chances of talking to her.

That summer, I had decided to stay in Portland because I had gotten a research position at my university. I found a relatively cheap apartment by the water's edge and made my home in Portland, where I live, to this day. 

My life became redundant. Since I had last seen the coffeeshop girl when I visited my friend in the fall, it was no surprise that I fleetingly had forgotten her. Freshman year of college had gone by quickly and in a storm of final research papers, exams, and drunken late nights at the local bar, I had almost forgotten about the mysteriously beautiful girl that I had flittingly seen from the window of the coffeeshop.

When I began my internship as an assistant researcher in the Biology department of my university, my life became dull. Research, I soon found out, was incredibly boring and tedious. The precision it took to swab a culture of bacteria onto a plate and record their growth on different media was snoozeworthy. It didn't help that the other research assistants were all enormously cocky and nerdy. In their down time while our cultures centrifuged, they would discuss their latest happenings on World of War Craft. I had to tell myself multiple times that the only reason I was doing the research was because it would look good on a medical school resume. That was the only thing that kept me going.

One morning, I had to wake up early to get to the lab. There was a certain time limit that we had to let the bacteria sit in a media and I had to take the plates out so the whole experiment wouldn't get screwed up. I remember I had unwilliingly gotten out of bed that day, unthrilled to meet the rainy, gloomy Portland weather outside. I had pulled on my business casual wear and walked grudgingly to the coffeeshop I had seen nearly a year ago. And there, sitting by the window, sipping her coffee, was my mystery coffeeshop girl.

Going back to the corner, where I first saw you. Gonna camp in my sleeping bag, I'm not gonna move...

When I laid eyes on her, the first thing my heart did was skip a beat. Immediately, I was fully awake and alert. It was her! It was my coffeeshop girl! She looked more beautiful than ever, with her hair pulled back and her big blue eyes staring. How was it possible that I was seeing her again? Surely, I couldn't waste this opportunity to introduce myself. After all, who knew if I would ever see her again?