The Worst Thing You Can Be Is Halfway

Two masks and a barista.

Spring 2021.

I’m at a hipster coffee shop in Phoenix. A weekday, mid-morning. I used to like to go there to write. Back when I had dreams of writing professionally but had yet to take any meaningful steps to get anything out there.

The vax had been out for a few months. The elderly and essential workers first. Then the rest of us. People posted pics of their new vax cards on Facebook like they had just gotten their diplomas. We were told this was the end of the pandemic.

Then nothing changed.

The signs stayed up. The masking tape arrows on the floor still told you which way to walk down the aisle at the grocery store. Plexiglass between you and the cashier. Plastic domes on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. The masks stayed on. The restrictions held.

I sat in the corner with a coffee and a laptop, working on something I would never show anyone. Masked. Of course I was masked. I was always masked then, mouth and nose fully covered. Every few minutes, I’d unhook one ear loop, take a sip of coffee and rehook it over my ear.

I wrote in the mornings, when the light was best and the place was empty enough to think. Short stories, mostly. Things I made up and tinkered with and saved and closed and never sent anywhere. But I knew they were good.

So I sat there with my mask on and my talent zipped up and wrote and observed.

An Unmasked Man Walks In

Mid-fifties. Business casual. Looks like he probably commands a small unit in the Cubicle Army. Maybe a small team of customer service reps. Or bank branch energy, maybe. Khakis and a polo. Non-descript and unintimidating. But no mask.

He gets in line. Orders a coffee and a breakfast sandwich. The sandwich takes a few minutes. So he stands there. Scrolling his phone. A dozen masked people within ten feet of him, and a bare face among them, waiting on a sausage croissant.

Nobody says anything.

He isn’t making a point. No chin up, no looking around to see who’s noticing. Zero defiance in his body language. He’s just a middle-aged man waiting for his breakfast.

His name gets called. He takes the bag, takes the cup, and walks out into the Phoenix glare.

Three, four minutes, start to finish. Nobody said a word as four masked-up baristas scurried back and forth behind the counter.

A Young Woman Sits Down

A few minutes later she came in.

Younger. Thirty at the most, probably a little younger. Pantsuit, she looked fantastic, professionally dressed. Whatever she did for work she was new at it, you could tell by the newness of the suit and the nervous energy she was giving off. Wide-eyed. Quick shallow breathing from the ribs, not the belly.

She ordered, sat down two tables over, and spread her things out. Papers. A laptop. A printed sheet she kept glancing at, looked like a real estate logo on one of the pamphlets.

A newly minted real estate agent prepping for a meeting that had her rent and grocery money riding on it. A pitch to a potential buyer, perhaps, or a marketing plan, something that mattered right now. Being a rookie real estate agent is a tough gig.

A cloth mask over her mouth. Loose, sagging under her nose.

She’d slapped it on her face and forgotten it, because every ounce of her was on the sheet in front of her and the hour ahead of her. She wasn’t defying anything. She was focused on holding it together for the important thing that came next.

Meanwhile, a pride of baristas stirred behind the counter.

Somebody Says Something

A barista came out from behind the counter.

Apron, name tag, mask snugged up tight. The barista crossed the floor with focused eyes and a walk that had purpose.

“Excuse me, do you mind covering your nose?”

The young woman came apart.

“Oh my gosh, yes, sorry, sorry.” Her hand flew to the mask and pulled it up, then pulled it again, an adjustment that wasn’t needed, just a hand needing somewhere to go. “Sorry. Thank you. Sorry.”

She apologized three times and thanked the barista who had crossed the floor to correct her. She complied instantly, wide-eyed, apologetic, because she could not afford a scene, could not afford to be the difficult one. She had to stay likable. She stays likable for a living. It wasn’t cowardice. It was economics. A young woman who sells herself for a living, in the respectable version, cannot be the woman who makes a scene at the coffee shop.

The barista walked back behind the counter.

And the young woman sat there. Her wide eyes even wider. Her shallow breathing even shallower.

Whatever she’d been building for the next hour, the pitch, was gone. She’d been holding it together with both hands, and someone had asked her to take one of them off her work and put it on her face.

I Was the Most Masked Person There

She wasn’t a coward.

She folded because she couldn’t afford not to. She had a meeting in a few minutes that decided whether she could stay in business or have to go back to a cubicle somewhere, and that meeting ran on being likable, on being easy, on being the kind of person a stranger says yes to. You don’t get to be that person at ten o’clock and the person who made a scene at a coffee shop at nine-thirty.

And then I thought about the man.

Khakis. Polo. Bare face for four minutes at the counter, a dozen of us within reach of him, and not one word. The barista with the purposeful little walk had stayed behind the counter the whole time he stood there.

She crossed the floor for the nose. She never crossed it for the face.

Only the ones who are already half down get hunted.

The young real estate agent with her nervous energy, and I with a Google folder full of dozens of short stories I never let anyone read, sat at our tables like a couple of limping gazelles on the savanna.

But her mask was loose. Mine was perfect.

She got hunted because she had one thing showing, one nervous, half-kept thing she couldn’t quite cover while she focused on what mattered. I had nothing showing. I’d sealed it all up years ago, the stories, the wanting, the whole of me, tucked in so tight there was no edge to catch.

I’d called that safe. It wasn’t safe.

The man walked in bare-faced and got his sandwich because he was all in on the smallest thing in the world. I’d never once been all in on the biggest thing in mine.

That was the day I took the mask off.

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I’m after storytelling that trusts you to feel it without being told how. Poe never told you to be frightened. Dickinson never told you what to feel about death. You felt it anyway. That’s what I’m chasing, and I’m doing most of it on Substack now, the personal stuff, the real conversation, engaging in the comments. Medium gets some articles. The best is over there.

Find me on Substack, X, and Buy Me a Coffee.