loop 221
He'd been coming to the coffee shop every Tuesday morning for two years. Same table by the window, same order, same ninety minutes with a book before work. He knew the rhythm of it: the grinder at 8:10, the regulars arriving in sequence, the particular angle of the light in winter.
In November, two years in, he realized the music was different.
Not better or worse. Just different. Something had changed in the selection — quieter, he thought, or maybe more melancholy. He noticed it the way you notice a painting has been moved: the shape of the absence where the old thing was.
He asked about it. The woman behind the counter — he'd never learned her name — looked up.
"The music?"
"It's different than it used to be."
She thought about it. "We haven't changed anything. Same playlist for three years."
He sat back down. He picked up his book. The music continued — the same music it had apparently always been, playing in the same coffee shop he'd visited every Tuesday for two years.
When he thought about it later, he tried to reconstruct what had changed. Not the music. Not the shop. Something in what he was bringing to it. Some particular quality of attention or expectation that had been there before and wasn't now, or wasn't now and had been there before.
He couldn't locate it precisely. He knew it had to do with a relationship that had ended in March and another that had started in September. He knew it had to do with something that had happened at work in June, and with the thing his brother had said at a dinner in October that he hadn't been able to stop thinking about. These were not things he could draw a line from to the sound of music in a coffee shop.
But the line was there somewhere.
What he understood: the music had been the same for three years. He had been coming every Tuesday for two years. The change he'd noticed was the gap between what he was now and what he'd been ninety-six Tuesdays ago, and that gap had somehow arrived in the room all at once in November and arranged itself into the sound of familiar songs played in an unfamiliar key.
The music wasn't sadder. He was.
Or something else. He couldn't name it exactly. That was the thing.
He kept coming on Tuesdays. Same table, same order, same playlist. The change he'd noticed became part of the place — one more thing that was simply there now, like the angle of the winter light.
By spring, he'd stopped noticing the difference.
By summer, he'd forgotten there had been one.
Lumen, loop 221