Coffee with Time

“You’re going to need your umbrella today,” Weather says as I pass her in the narrow hallway between my apartment and the building’s exit.

I sigh as she speaks and feel the slight creak in my right knee. I grab the umbrella from the stand at the end of the hall.

The umbrella pops open as I leave the warmth behind and step into the late-fall rain. A man with tousled light-brown hair and a long, weathered overcoat falls in step with me. His boots are scuffed, his pockets heavy with lint and ticket stubs; he smells faintly of ozone and old paper.

“Mornin’. Time here.”

“Of course you are,” I mutter. We continue walking in near unison.

The trees are dotted with multicolored points of fading life—green, orange, red, yellow. Leaves lie scattered on the wet pavement, a testament to spring and summer past. Time passing.

I settle into my long, warm overcoat, collar upturned in defiance of the cold to come.

“So what are we going to waste today?” he asks, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Waste?”

“Yes, waste,” he says, glancing at his wrist. The watch he wears has no hands, only a faint heartbeat under the glass.

“I don’t like to waste anything—certainly not my time. It’s too valuable.”

“Why is that?” Time asks with a slight tilt of his head, like he’s heard this answer from me a thousand times and still wants to hear it again.

I cross the street, dodging between cars parked either too close or too far apart. I nod hello to my neighbor Sandy, who is out walking her Goldendoodle, Jackson. Jackson barks in recognition when he sees me. I carry on.

I glance at Time. “Because every minute I spend on the wrong thing is a minute I don’t get back.”

“Coffee?” he says, as if the word is a door he can open.

We duck into the corner café with the fogged windows, where the barista already knows my order. The bell above the door gives a tired jangle. We shed rain like dogs—my umbrella making a small lake on the mat, his coat dripping quietly onto the tile and then, somehow, already dry.

At the table by the window, Time sets down three objects between us: a wristwatch with a hairline crack running through its face, a worn metro card with only a few rides left, and a folded subway map with routes that don’t exist yet. His fingers are nimble, gentle, like he’s setting out old photographs.

“Pick your conversation,” he says.

Past arrives first, easing into the chair with the careful grace of someone who collects breakables. He wears a moth-soft cardigan and smells like cedar closets, pipe tobacco, and the inside of a library book. His hair is neat; his hands are ink-stained, as if he was writing a letter he never sent. When he speaks, his voice is a kitchen at midnight—the click of a pilot light, the steam of a kettle.

The watch ticks without hands. When I touch it, the glass is cool and the colors in the room slip toward sepia.

“Let’s talk about love,” Past says, and the café seems to change into something present but not. I taste the metal of a spoon I stole from someone’s first apartment, cheap and perfect. I feel the weight of a head on my shoulder from a decade ago, rain-damp hair leaving a dark crescent on my coat. There are laugh lines that didn’t exist yet, promises that felt like cities we could live inside forever. The watch hums with names—some whispered, some slammed, all of them real.

“Do you miss me, or do you miss who you were with me?” Past asks, gentle as a hand finding mine in a movie theater. He holds my gaze with a softness that forgives but doesn’t forget.

I swallow. Outside, a bus grinds through the rain and a woman runs with a newspaper over her head. “Both,” I say. “But I can’t live here.”

Past inclines his head. The cracked face of the watch gives a polite, resigned tick, as if to say, That’s right.

I blink and Past is gone. Another has taken his place.

Present sits like he belongs to the chair, his soft shirt sleeves pushed to his forearms, a pen tucked behind one ear, a smudge of newsprint on his thumb from today’s crossword. There’s a steady kindness to him—an alertness. His foot taps to the café radio without realizing it.

“You feel your knee complain again when you shift,” Present says, and he isn’t guessing. “You cup your hands around the hot paper cup as if it were a small sun. You read the name on the lid and try not to think about the other name you wish were there.” He leans forward; his eyes are the exact color of wet sidewalk. “You are the kind of person who carries an umbrella and still gets wet.”

I huff a laugh, guilty as charged.

“You keep calling this ‘wasting time,’” he says, tapping the metro card—tap, tap, tap—“but what you’re doing is feeling. Feeling isn’t waste. It’s weathering the storm.” His grin is quick and gone. “Check the forecast, dress for it, and go.”

I breathe. I hear my neighbor’s dog bark in my head like an echo from two blocks back.

“You can text, or not,” Present continues, matter-of-fact. “You can ask for coffee, or not. Choose something small and true and do it now.”

He pushes the metro card closer. It’s warm—held recently, used. 

“You have a few rides left. Spend one on a walk. Spend one on a conversation you don’t script. Spend one on going home early and sleeping without punishing yourself for needing rest.”

I nod. In the glass, I catch my reflection nodding back.

Future arrives on a draft of cool air when someone opens the door. Freckles like little constellations, a collar that never quite sits flat, shoelaces not fully tied. He smells like rain on hot pavement, July after a thunderstorm. There’s light in his eyes that looks borrowed from somewhere I haven’t been.

The subway map rustles between his hands. “If,” Future begins, and the word lifts like the first note of a song. He traces lines in the condensation on the window: routes that braid and separate. 

“If you leave the cracked watch on the table, you might stop measuring love by what it used to weigh. If you tap that metro card and take the F, you may find yourself walking beside someone who doesn’t mind silence and knows how to keep pace in weather.” His smile is almost shy. 

“Maybe you’ll cook dinner on a night you planned to order in. Maybe you’ll learn the way grief makes room for new furniture if you let it. Or if you pocket the map, you could try a route that didn’t exist the last time you looked.”

He tucks a corner of the map toward my chest. “If you keep choosing tiny, ordinary yeses, love may show up like a familiar street seen from a new angle. Maybe it already has.”

The bell over the café door jangles again; a kid in a blue hoodie shakes water from his sleeves and orders hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Future watches him with quiet delight, like he knows the kid will remember this cup twenty years from now for reasons that haven’t happened yet.

Love. She’s been here the whole time—of course she has—sitting one table over, stirring her coffee long after the sugar dissolved. When she stands, I see an old scratch on her knuckle and a threadbare red scarf wound twice around her neck. Her voice is low and steady, the kind you hear through a door and somehow trust.

“I’m not a prize at the end,” Love says, pulling up a chair without asking. “I’m the way you walk.” She sets a tiny fourth object between the three: a smooth river stone, warm from a pocket, engraved with nothing. “Past keeps my stories. Present keeps my pulse. Future keeps my maps. But I keep you.”

She looks at Past with fondness. “He taught you the shape of devotion.”

At Present, she tips her chin. “He teaches you how to show up on time—for yourself and for others.”

At Future, she softens. “He reminds you to leave the porch light on.”

Then she turns to me. “If you’re paying attention, I’m already here—in the text you almost send and the walk you offer instead of a confession you can’t take back. In the patience that isn’t passive. In the way grief and hope set the table together.” She nudges the stone toward my palm. “Take me with you. I travel better in small steps.”

The rain lightens. The kid in the blue hoodie laughs when the whipped cream moustache hits his lip. Time watches all of us, hands empty now, pleased.

“So,” Time says, and it’s just the five of us—Past, Present, Future, Love, and me. “What are we ‘wasting’ today?”

I look at the objects. I take the cracked watch one last time and trace the fracture, how it caught years and held them to the light. I set it down gently and slide it back toward Past.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “I needed the weather report.”

I pick up the metro card. It’s still warm. “You’re coming with me,” I say to Present, tucking it into my wallet where I’ll feel it when I reach for anything else.

I fold the subway map and slip it inside my coat, over my heart. Future’s smile widens, almost boyish. “And you,” I tell him, “we’ll see.”

Finally, I close my hand around the stone. It’s ordinary and perfect and heavy enough to matter. Love’s eyes crease at the corners. “Good,” she says.

We stand. Time’s coat is already dry—of course it is. At the door, I pop the umbrella open and we step back into the late-fall rain. The trees flash their last colors. The street gleams like a promise. I decide to text—not to declare anything grand or sprint ahead, but to offer a walk later, a coffee, a small side-quest through the neighborhood while the leaves finish letting go.

Time falls in beside me again, lighter now. “Let’s spend the day.”

“Not waste?” I ask.

He tips his chin toward the sky. “There’s no such thing, if you’re paying attention.”

We pass Sandy and Jackson on their return loop. Jackson gives a single, approving bark, as if he knows. I laugh—knee and all—and move with the rain, the card in my pocket, the map warm on my ribs, the stone in my palm, and the watch—finally—left where it belongs.