"My last girlfriend left me with a Spice Girls' song."
So that was it --I was left in the City, no girlfriend, no business partner (one and the same, of course, why did I never listen to that all your eggs in one basket advice?), a good deal of books in boxes, very poor financial sense, and one incredibly large case of self-pity, which took me from the coffee shop to the park to the occasional stopover in the pub. Just your average sad and pathetic character walking the streets.
All until God Coffee and it's slightly more gracefully discovered counterpart, I Miss You. And I'm not altogether sure whether it then got better or worse.
[It] had been flattened and yet remained in the middle of the sidewalk, for me to step over, glance back, stub my foot against an uneven flagstone, glance quickly forward again as my arms shot out to either side searching for some sort of balance, and I came to an utterly graceless halt, leaning against/in a hedge in front of an apartment building, one arm still out-stretched."
That helped enormously in cementing God Coffee into my imagination.
This could very well be what I deserve, getting a literature degree from the University, relegated to a life of wandering the streets, interpreting rubbish and taking cues from that interpretation. I should have listened to the vast majority of sense I either had related to me or that I used to possess and done something else, maybe gotten a job in computers or something. After all the trouble with her toothbrush, the failing bookstore/converted appliance shoppe, dodgy friends that carried unwieldly packages all over the City at the worst possible hours in the day, not being able to pay at restaurants, and now a very long bus ride with a few irritable elderly citizens, I surely could have found something much more worthwhile and rewarding. Though, I have to admit, it possibly was absolutely worth it. Who can tell?
All because of a lot of rubbish.
God Coffee, I Miss You is the forthcoming novel from Sane Magazine founder Matthew Hanlon. He is also the author of Time: a novel. He has lived in London and Brooklyn and the Santa Clara Valley, California and is now back home in Massachusetts.