Week Four: Reportage

It doesn't take long for routine to settle back in to the cracks you develop in a new culture. Every morning now, I wake up at 7am and get dressed, balanced on one food between the puddles on our bathroom floor. By 8, I deposit myself and my laptop in Vincenzo Art Cafe, greeted with a polite Buongiorno and half-eyes by Ishara, a mousy bartender with an asymmetrical haircut and a penchant for wandering past the cafe late at night while I a, perched on the ledge outside waiting for the only male bartender to close the building and wander late night Spoleto with me. In the morning, though, long before friction beneath a midnight bell, Ishara offers flat-faced cappuccino and the almond pastry I have learned the name for, a tiny moving circle on my tongue, twice already. Always the shooting steam sound of caffe and tea, strings of people held up on the counter only by the lip of their caffeine. Here, it is the same as anywhere else. Coffee and morning chatter, polite only because the ones behind the counter have offered you sanity. At these extreme hours, always the same people: the woman with the hair tips tinged teal; the elderly man in full, checkered suit, fedora over grey cropped hair, and a pocket watch. He watches the pigeons through the window.