I love the sounds in a coffee shop. Two men next to me in quiet conversation. Bjork unobtrusively singing out of the speakers and the milk-foamer giving off occasional bursts that sound like a television gone fuzzy. A woman laughing across the room at a joke I didn’t hear. All this company and, except for the occasional chat with other regulars, I don’t talk to anyone.

I came here to write about intimacy. I don’t know if being here is intimacy, but it is enough connection to cut the edge off the bleakness that often comes at this time of the year, after the winter silence turns stale. This proximity to others, even those who I don’t know, gives me the right amount of distraction from myself to start writing.