GOODBYE, RICKY CAFÉ
“I carry within me all the dreams of the world.”
— Fernando Pessoa
There are cafés that serve coffee, and there are cafés that quietly hold fragments of one’s life.
Ricky Café, in Kendall, was once the latter.
On my days off in Miami, I would walk there without urgency. Beneath photographs of Paris—its bridges and its distant promise—I would sit, open a book, and repeat a small ritual in a language not spoken around me:
un café con leche, estilo de La Habana…
It was common that no one spoke English. And yet, there was understanding.
The older staff marked time by absence; the younger by smiles of return. In such places, one is not quite a customer, but not quite a stranger either.
Paris — Memory and Imagination
Slowly, imperceptibly, something shifted. Prices rose—not dramatically, but quietly, persistently. Then came the arithmetic of modern transactions: percentages layered upon percentages, until even a simple cup of coffee carried the weight of calculation.
What is lost in such moments is not money, but proportion.
I was reading Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa—a meditation on departure and return. I spoke of it to a woman from Honduras, long separated from her own city. She smiled with recognition. Literature, like migration, creates its own quiet kinships.
Miami — Heat, Habit, Return
Across the world—Mérida, Quiberon, Cochin, Havana—I have found such places. Cafés that ask little, and in return, offer something immeasurable: continuity.
But continuity is fragile.
In another part of the world, a sudden sixfold rise in the price of coffee would provoke outrage. Here, it dissolves into acceptance, like sugar in a cup—unseen, but altering everything.
I find myself less eager now to return.
And so, without ceremony, I leave.
Goodbye, Ricky Café.
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