The Secret Key to This Woman’s Heart

On cat art lattes and the joyometer

Oh so secret…

“I’m so sorry, I just turned off the machine,” he told me in Spanish. He had dark eyes, and his curly black hair was in a ponytail. He was wearing a long, patterned t-shirt under his smock. On his left arm, he had a beautifully unusual orange and blue tattoo of the famous Japanese wave painting.

I looked at my watch. It was 4:30 pm. I was standing in front of the brass-tinted counter at his coffee shop. My request for a whole milk latte now felt foolish. It was only my second day in Mexico City. I was fresh off the plane from Brooklyn, and it showed. A hint of annoyance at myself crept over me. Why was I imposing my New York conventions onto this well-meaning Mexican barista? (He is more famously known as Specimen 1: The Barista, i.e. the man who has given me the most orgasms). I was being that white girl, that gringa. He could probably smell how entitled I was by my very presence.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I said in Spanish. I returned to my table, where I continued to type away at some umpteenth chapter of my novel.

The next afternoon, I sat on the sunken leather couch in the back of his coffee shop. I looked up from the less-than-good draft of whatever chapter I was working on. It was him again. Except this time, he placed a small saucer and a cup on the coffee table in front of me. My eyes lit up at the sight of it. My mouth opened wide in gleeful shock.

She so purrdy

He had made me a latte and drawn a picture of a cat into the foam. How can I describe the feeling? Basically, I lost it. This gift of cute, detailed squiggles in the milk bubbles. The world around me melted away as I felt him face the complete totality of my humanness. Could he see right through me? Were all my deepest secrets splayed out like a billboard for him to read? The memory of this makes me tingle. At that moment, with that tiny gesture, I felt like this man could move mountains.

Maybe receiving a cat art latte doesn’t mean much to you. But let me tell you: to me, it was like ecstasy. It was like heaven on Earth. It spoke volumes to me. Tomes. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica, if you will. I had been on plenty of faceless, far more expensive, and yet far more forgettable dinner dates with other men before this moment. But as it turned out, somehow, this barista had plowed through all the bull crap that was stopping my true self from connecting with others, and he saw me. Maybe by mistake even, he had grasped what I needed at that moment and beyond. And now the line of my life and his life had fused and aligned like the tip of a spear.

Here’s why:

1. I am obsessed with cats.

2. The drawing of the cat was the cutest thing ever.

3. I love free coffee; I’m incredibly cheap.

4. Receiving gifts and acts of service are my major love languages. This man had managed to achieve both in the span of a second. I’m lazy in that sense. God forbid I have to take time away from my writing to make myself a latte.

5. To me, coffee symbolizes productivity, enjoyment, indulgence, and love. In a way, he was giving me the energy and the support I needed to write my book. This man could give me the fuel I needed to keep going.  

6. To me, it showed that he was generous, kind, and looking out for others. He remembered the things that I had told him. He had been listening. I felt taken care of. He was perceptive, empathetic, and understanding even. Chivalry was not dead after all.

7. I’m also a sucker for novelty. I had seen trees and hearts in latte art before. But never a cat. It was an invention of pure genius, wit, and wonder.

This cat art latte spoke directly to my inner child. There was something so playful about it also. It was a shot of pure joy straight to my heart. Yet the truth was that this barista made those cat drawings in his customers’ lattes all the time. He had also worked in that exact café for the last two years, and he had never dated a customer before me. His everyday gesture had never captured someone’s heart quite like he had captured mine.

Deep, human connection is so spontaneous and random. When you meet someone, and you catch each other’s eyes in that slight way, there are those invisible strings already pulling you together. You can’t make this shit up. You can’t time it, plan it, or replicate it. Your different frequencies somehow already speak the same language. It feels special. You have something special. Like a unique configuration of elements in the universe is conspiring and molding itself so that this happens for the first time and the last time ever all at once. Casually, lol.

I guess the point is that we never know what will speak to us. We rarely feel that the people we go on dates with can understand us or read our real feelings and needs between the lines. But these unique configurations with another person do happen. They’re rare. And they are pure joy.

Yesterday, I was chatting to a girl I’d just met at a dinner party. She was a humanities teacher at a high school and a history nerd. And she had met her boyfriend on Tinder, of all places.

“Tinder?” I gawked at her, “How did he stand out from all the swiping?”

“Oh, I went on hundreds of terrible dates before him. But then he took me to a rooftop bar in the Zocalo. And from there, we could see all the ruins of the Temple Mayor. Like the Eagle Building and the Great Temple and everything. All while we were sipping our mezcalitos. It was so freaking awesome.”

I smiled. Perhaps this history-inspired cocktail date was her version of my cat art latte. Perhaps we all have the little secret pleasures of our souls. And occasionally, at the right moment, someone steps into our lives and unlocks them.

This graph summarizes just how much joy his cat art lattes gave me:

💌 ✍️

P.S. You can read more about the barista here and here.