A small writing

He strolls down the street having just bought a coffee. Inside the coffee shop people sat chatting or staring intently at their laptop computers. A milieu of refinement settled in the shop, the frothy air filled with aromas of espresso and darkly roasted, ground coffee beans, and the subtle background music of an orchestra playing a work from an old dead German composer, maybe Austrian. The brick that made up the streets overreached its bounds and continued onto the sidewalks and up the walls of the small, quaint houses. It was as if the entire neighborhood were one giant entity built with red brick and this permeated the souls of its inhabitants, engendering a feeling of community.
The past weeks snow had melted substantially during the oppressive winter day sun, but with the daystar’s departure a deep freeze had settled back leaving a thick icing upon the sidewalks. He walked gingerly on the precarious ice and stopped periodically to sip at the rich coffee. With each breath a ghostly cloud crystallized before his eyes and then faded in the same ominous manner as it had come.
He spent many nights in the same solitude as now, and felt that maybe that it was too many nights. Maybe he should be mixing it up at a loud party, shouting at friends an inch from his face, straining to hear their responses, but all the while laughing and being merry. These were the images in his mind at this moment. People huddling together in a cozy house in groups of four or more, everyone donning thick, wooly sweaters and drinking wine or egg nog. He wondered if he were missing out on some essential part of life, that quintessential feeling of the holiday season where people gather in merriment. Or was it contrived merriment.
He thought back to times where he was in that situation, where the environment around him appeared to be the scene in his current reverie. What if someone, some voyeur, had been peering through a window into a friend’s apartment he had gone to a couple days before Christmas two years ago. If those anonymous eyes could make out the scene through the frosted panes of glass. Twenty or thirty people clustered about with glasses in hand, smiles across everyones faces, people laughing big artificial laughs with wide open mouths. The intent interest that people feigned as they listened to others try to convey just how not-boring their lives were. They would talk with great interest about their jobs and their children. But to the careful observer, well, our careful observer whose eyes twinkled behind the snow-lined panes, he would see that this man’s reverie, who stood drinking coffee on a frigid winter night, and in fact the scene the voyeur was watching with his own two eyes, was nothing short of a fraud.
He sipped his coffee. The heat still emanating from the top of the styrofoam cup in lucid swirls. He thought again if he were really missing out on some essential feeling of community. If that were the reason for his emptiness. But after thinking back to that night in his friend’s apartment, he was the person behind the window. And he had felt just as alone and distant as he did now on the dimly lit street corner.