We Were Stardust in a Coffeeshop

We Were Stardust in a Coffeeshop

Genre: Poetic Short Story

I don’t remember what pulled me into that coffeeshop on a Tuesday afternoon — maybe the drizzle, maybe the craving, or maybe something else entirely.

The place smelled like cinnamon, like pages that had been read too many times, like someone's memory of comfort. Rain painted slow trails down the window, and Miles Davis played low enough to feel like a heartbeat.

And then you walked in.

Not in a dramatic, movie-scene kind of way. No wind in your hair. No glowing halo. Just a quiet presence, like a note in a song that makes you pause without knowing why.

You ordered black coffee, no sugar, and sat at the table across from mine — both of us alone, both of us pretending we weren't.

You caught me staring. I smiled, awkward. You nodded — the smallest acknowledgment, but it cracked something open in me.

I looked down at my journal. I hadn’t written in weeks. The pages were tired of waiting. But I couldn’t stop glancing up. There was something about you… not your face, not your clothes, but the way you existed.

Like you'd done it before. Like you'd been here before. Like we'd been here before.

You pulled out a book. The spine was weathered. I couldn’t see the title, but I imagined it was poetry. You looked like someone who would underline metaphors and scribble thoughts in the margins.

And suddenly, I remembered.

Not in this life. But in some life.

In a life before mortgages and deadlines and small talk.

In some golden, unrecorded moment between centuries, I remembered you.

I remembered dancing barefoot with you on the deck of a ship under moonlight, in a life where we were sailors or dreamers — or both.

I remembered sharing a cigarette on a rooftop in Paris, 1927, laughter muffled by revolution and jazz.

I remembered being sculpted by your hands in Florence, marble dust in our hair, a half-finished statue that neither of us could bear to complete.

And now, here we were again.

Two strangers in a modern coffeeshop.

A latte and a black coffee between us.

You looked up. Our eyes met.

“Do I know you?” you asked — tentative, like the words themselves were afraid to exist.

“Not yet,” I replied.

You laughed, and the sound was exactly the right pitch for the room. Not too loud. Not too quiet. Just enough to stir the stars in my chest.

You gestured to the empty chair at your table.

I moved.

We didn’t talk much — not about jobs or where we were from. Those things felt irrelevant. We spoke in fragments.

Favorite colors.

Books that changed us.

Moments we regretted.

What the ocean meant to each of us.

You said you believed in soul recognition. That when you meet someone your spirit already knows, the world shifts — even if just slightly.

I told you it felt like we were living a déjà vu stretched into a whole afternoon.

You said, “Maybe time isn’t linear. Maybe love isn’t either.”

I didn’t respond. I was busy memorizing the curve of your jaw as you said it.

Outside, the rain slowed to a drizzle. Inside, time was elastic.

The barista announced closing in ten minutes.

You looked at your watch, then back at me, and smiled — and I knew this was the kind of smile people write about and rarely mean.

We stood up together. You didn’t ask for my number.

I didn’t offer it.

It wasn’t sadness — it was understanding. We weren’t meant to last in this lifetime.

But we had lasted before.

And maybe we would again.

You held the door open for me. The street was slick with gold from streetlamps. I stepped out, and you stepped the other way.

You turned once.

“I hope we find each other again,” you said.

“We always do,” I whispered.

I returned to the coffeeshop a week later. Sat in the same chair. Ordered the same drink.

You never came back. But your chair never stayed empty for long.

People came and went. Strangers with eyes like forgotten lullabies.

But no one ever felt quite like you.

Still, I kept writing. My journal became a constellation of half-memories and coffee-stained metaphors.

One entry reads:

“We were stardust in a coffeeshop — brief, bright, and burning with something too ancient to explain. And if that was all we were in this lifetime… it was enough.”

And I meant it.