The coffee shop is in Decatur, on a street I've never been to, in a neighborhood that is not near the facility or the arena or any of the places where Jamie Kowalski, hockey player, exists. This is the point. This is a place where I can be a person sitting in a chair drinking coffee with another person, and the person across from me is not a journalist and I am not a source and the space between those two facts is the space we're about to fill.
Declan is already there when I arrive. He's at a corner table near the window, and the first thing I notice is the glasses. They're on. The matte black rectangles that I've been learning to read the way Mars reads shooters: as indicators of intent, positioning, the angle of approach. Glasses on means the journalist is on. Glasses on means the professional frame is in place.
I sit down. He's ordered coffee. There's a second cup in front of the empty chair, and the second cup is tea, Earl Grey, and the fact that he remembered I drink tea instead of coffee (I mentioned it once, in a hallway, in a sentence fragment about hotel room beverage options) produces a sensation in mychest that is warm and specific and entirely inappropriate for a beverage.
"You remembered the tea," I say.
"I'm a journalist. I remember everything."
"You said this was not as a journalist."
He looks at me. The look is steady and warm and carrying something that the glasses are supposed to be protecting him from and are, I can see, failing to protect him from. The glasses are on but the wall is not. The wall fell when he sent the text. Fourteen words. Meet me for coffee. Not as a journalist. As a person.
"You're right," he says. He takes off the glasses. Folds them. Sets them on the table between us, next to the tea and the coffee, a small black rectangle that is no longer a barrier but an object, inert, optional.
"Better," I say. The word is a callback and we both know it.
We talk.
The talking is not like any talking I have done since I arrived in Atlanta. The press conferences are performance. The hallway conversations are stolen. The team interactions are genuine but bounded by the fact that I am hiding something that limits how much of myself I can deploy. This conversation has no boundary. The recorder is not here. The press credential is not here. The notebook is not here. Declan is sitting across from me in a T-shirt and jeans with his glasses on the table and his eyes on my face and there is nothing between us except two cups and a table and the accumulated weight of weeks of almost.
He tells me about growing up in East Atlanta. About the year his family moved from Accra, when he was seven, and the way English sounded to him then: musical but incomprehensible, like a song in a language he was learning to love before he understood the words. About his mother's jollof rice, which he describes with a specificity that suggests the recipe is a familyheirloom and the jollof is a love language and the two things are the same thing. About his father, Kwame, who runs a printing business in Decatur with a machine that should have been retired twenty years ago and a stubbornness about keeping it running that his mother calls "the Osei disease."
I tell him about Duluth. Not the media version. The real version. The cold that shaped everything. The lake that was the first beautiful thing I ever saw and that I measured all subsequent beauty against. My father's rink, the outdoor rink that froze in November and was my whole world from November to March, and the sound the puck made on that ice, which was different from any other ice because outdoor ice is rougher and the puck travels differently and the sound is deeper, more resonant, the sound of a thing hitting a surface that is connected to the earth rather than floating above it.
I tell him about Becca. About her intelligence and her humor and her ability to see through me with a precision that should be annoying and is instead the most comforting thing in my life.
"She sounds like she should be a journalist," he says.
"She would be terrifying as a journalist. She already knows everything about everyone. The credential would just make it official."
He laughs. The laugh changes his face. Without the glasses, his face is more mobile, more expressive, the features less contained by the professional frame. His eyes crinkle. His mouth opens. The laugh is real and unreserved and the sound of it lands in my chest the way his questions land in my chest: specifically, warmly, in a place I didn't know was waiting to receive it.
We talk for three hours. The tea goes cold. His coffee goes cold. He orders another. The second one goes cold too, and the going-cold becomes a joke between us, a running bit about the inability of the beverages at this table to maintain their temperature, and I think about Mars and Theo and the coldcoffee that was their motif, the holding mattering more than the drinking, and I wonder if this is what that looked like from the inside.
He talks about his brothers, Kofi and Yaw, who are both older and who once showed up at his first AJC byline with a framed copy and a cake. He talks about his friend Priya, who works in tech and has no interest in hockey and who is, he says, "the only person in my life who tells me the truth even when the truth is inconvenient." The way he says this, with a specificity that suggests Priya recently told him something true and inconvenient, makes me wonder what the truth was.
I talk about my parents. About my father's coaching, the way he teaches hockey as a philosophy rather than a sport. About my mother, who is a nurse and who handles emergencies with a calmness that suggests she has seen everything and has decided that panic is a waste of time. About the house in Duluth, which is small and warm and full of hockey gear and the smell of whatever my mother is cooking, and which I miss with a physical ache that lives in my sternum and that I have not told anyone about because telling someone would require explaining that the ache is not just about the house. The ache is about the version of myself that lived in that house. The version that was simpler. The version that didn't have a name in his chest and a search bar in his history and a wall around his heart.
I don't say this last part. Not explicitly. But the three hours of conversation have created a proximity that is not physical (we are separated by a table) but is something else. An emotional proximity. The proximity of two people who have shown each other enough of themselves that the remaining concealed parts are visible by implication, the way a partially exposed photograph reveals the whole image through the composition of the visible portions.
Declan sees what I'm not saying. He has always seen what I'm not saying. This is his gift and his curse and the reason I'm sitting in this coffee shop: because being not-said-and-seen is better than being not-said-and-invisible, and Declan Osei is the only person in my life who makes me feel seen without requiring me to speak.
Near the end of the three hours, the light in the coffee shop changes. The afternoon sun shifts and the window light moves across the table and catches Declan's face and he reaches for his glasses out of habit, the automatic gesture of a man who puts his glasses on when conditions change, and I say:
"Don't."
He stops. His hand is on the glasses. The glasses are on the table. His eyes are on me.
"Don't put them on," I say. "You look different without them."
"Different how?"
"Less like you're working. More like you're here."
He moves his hand away from the glasses. He puts his hand on the table instead, palm down, fingers spread. The hand is six inches from my hand, which is also on the table, also palm down, also fingers spread. The six inches are the last of the distance that has been closing since the first hallway, and the six inches are not going to close today because today is not the day and this is not the place, but the six inches are visible and acknowledged and real.
"I'm here," he says.