Having worked in two different Starbucks locations for the better part of a year, I can confirm that yes, coffeeshops are an alternate dimension of fuckery. Except most of the time, in my case, the fuckery in question was me.

Storytime, fuckers.

In 2016, a few months after losing my dad, I decided it was a brilliant fucking idea to start working at a Starbucks while in Maryland college because I didn’t want to go back to Texas that summer and wanted extra pocket money in the meantime.

I ended up going back to Texas anyway and working through the summer at the local Starbucks in my town there.

It was there that I met a guy who walked in one day after I started teaching myself violin like the absolute shit gremlin that I was. We’ll call him Kylo. Kylo had a ukulele on his back that my over caffeinated brainhole mistook for a violin. Kylo and I got to talking so hard that I was reprimanded by my supervisor and sent packing to clean to the very batshit bathrooms that played host to all manner of filth. Kylo went home, or so I thought. Turns out he came back inside and gave me his number on a napkin or something. I don’t fucking know. It was a long time ago.

We got to talking more after I got off of work and didn’t stop talking. We started dating awhile later.

There was just one small problem.

I was a disaster. And I was one disaster in an unacknowledged DID system that was bursting at the seams. So the relationship went about as well as you’d expect.

In other words, it ended pretty damn horribly less than a month later. Not knowing how to process any of my insurmountable grief or anything I was dealing with at the time, I turned to my good old friend songwriting, and wrote and recorded my second album A Stranger Who Listened in the span of about a week. Fun fact, I recorded it in a practice room at a university in Idaho that I call “Mormon college”. Did I end up going to Mormon college later on? You bet your sorry ass I did. Fuck that place.

I followed that thing up a few months later with my extended play Nothing Will Keep Us Together and my album North, extensions of the same attempt to process… Well… Everything.

Another time, back at Maryland college, my headmate Eight decided to be the fucking drama and run a FUCKING 5k in full equestrian gear, though. I think we have photos still.

We are insane.

-Allēna