In huddled groups they sit; a pair of colleagues; a table of girlfriends; a trio of blokes. Students and the working class. Every one is in some kind of a conversation; the girlfriends chat fast and animatedly; the pair of colleagues trade war stories in between sips from their bottles of Heineken; the members of the co-ed mix of thirty-somethings at the next table take turns adding to whatever or whoever it is they are jibing about. Their body language is easy and open. One of them beckons to a woman approaching in the distance. Soon, she joins them and the circle is complete.

Mine is the only table occupied by just one. It does seem I like it like this. Well, sometimes. I consider sitting at a cafe and watching others to be good practice for what i do for a living. It is surprising how much I can hear what others are saying even when I am plugged into my Walkman. Every one of them is an open book for me to read, every gesture a sentence, every glance a punctuation. In time, each and every one of them here will become characters in my cinematic world for me, marionettes that I can breathe life into, their glances I can orchestrate to the stirring riffs of a song, their fate I can manipulate with the slightest movement of the camera that is my all-seeing eye.

This moment—mine, and mine alone—marks the return to a routine long forsaken, and is a reminder that I still have in me so many stories I want to tell.