Two of the appealing things I have fallen in love are coffee and books. I like the cafe culture. They are places to meet, places to live- simply places to chill out. One can just sit happily for hours, watching the world go by. No mad waiter is there to tell you to leave and go once you have finished your eat.

I love Starbucks, warm, welcoming and they smell, ohh-so-good the roasted coffee, soft baked cakes, roasted cheese and just-out-of-the-oven bread and cakes. I like sitting there watching people out of the windows, curled up with a book, or just my thoughts. Coffee shops occupy an important space in many of our lives because of their unique ability to fulfil so many of our needs in an atmosphere that suits our tastes and makes us feel like we belong. When everybody is running short of time, these are the places where one can sit and relax and take a break from life. Where one can just be alone, but definitely not lonely. Where one can stop and smell the coffee and enjoy the munches.

I love books unconditionally. I must have loved another thing, but nothing and no one returned love like a book, as my heart renders it. Mere sentences and brief phrases and sometimes not a word telling the melancholy story of nervous pictures on thick stock paper pages I chewed in my mind and swallowed in my heart. Literature – its very creation and consumption – is quintessentially human. And it connects us as humans. If mere words written by another human being can literally create a new reality in my mind, my logic dictated, then of course the life we live comes from a super awesome supernal Imagination. Stories these books have are true and made-up and poems – shows us how we actually live. Whether the protagonists are real or made up, hobbits or rabbits or the bravest knight of all the noble's daughters, whether the setting fantastical or dystopian or historical or prescient, whether the conflict internal or external or both – we go with the words and hope to know something new or deeper or simple and plain about ourselves, humanity, and the world around us.

Sometimes books fall onto the carpet and you pick them up and they become part of who you are, how you see the world, how you experience other stories. Sometimes it's not just the book but what the book carries between its covers and what the book gives beyond its pages. Sometimes it's not just the book but the transcendent gift of boundless possibilities. Hope turns pages, even when they are soaked with tears.

By the end, I am ready for a new beginning - with a hot cup of coffee in my hand.