It’s a breezy overcast Sunday morning on Brickell, 9:30, and I’ve been at Starbucks for an hour, reading. Couples coming and going, couples flamboyant and chatty in their twenties, dressed in flip-flops and pajamas and shuffling over from nearby high-rises, and there are couple in their seventies who appear to have been awake for a long time already, dressed for comfort but carefully groomed, quiet over their coffee, one of them maybe reading the Times while the other scrolls through a phone. Each couple in a particular age group has the same demeanor of other couples in that age group.

I’m thinking of Sunday mornings with my ex. The day of the week we expect nothing of ourselves. Relaxed. Staying in bed ’til noon. Falling in and out of sleep. The way we got playful and grabbed or pinched each other and the playfulness morphing with smiles into a lazy kinda sex that feels more cozy than carnal. Contented sighs. Cuban coffee gets cold and tepid pretty fast but it sits there on the bedside table and we sip from the same cup of it for hours.

The couple directly beside me appears to be in their late 60s, early 70s, and she’s eating a banana piece by piece, slowly, looking great behind aviators, hair mostly blond but laced with gray and her posture perfect, legs crossed at the knee with a manicured foot bouncing to some anxious rhythm and she’s telling her husband about a mutual friend. The friend is having knee surgery. The surgery is complicated on account of it’s the third in eight years. Her husband is slim in white shorts and a white polo and a blue cap. His reading glasses sit on the edge of his nose and he regards her with his head tilted down. His legs are also folded at the knee and his hands laced in his lap. I’m wondering if their sex is a minefield of aches and favored limbs, old injuries, sore spots. I hope it’s fun, whatever the case, and that their schedules and moods allow for a good amount of it.

Twentysomethings shuffle past in sandals, holding hands and cups, chatting quickly and smiling but I only catch keywords. “Plans for the” and “I don’t know, because”. Then they’re out of ear shot. Off toward home.

The rain goes on and on and I go back to my book until the downpour slows to a drizzle, then a patter, and when the sun cuts through a cloud to light up the courtyard I collect my things and leave for yet another cafe, four miles down the road, where I’ll drink more coffee and do a little more writing and hopefully, if the timing’s right and the courage is with me, talk to somebody.