THERE HERE

One morning, I ended up at a coffee shop. At exactly 7:59 am, a college-aged couple appeared. The boy was tall, inked with vaguely tribal-looking tattoos, and sporting a rotator cuff recover sling. The girl was petite, blond, and wrapped in the requisite athleisure wear tights.

I was impressed they were up so early on a weekend, and by the time I found all the stuff I needed to exit the car, the coffeeshop had opened and the couple was already inside.

I waited while they ordered, and the boy turned so that I could see the front of his ball cap. It had a little grey alien head on it. To the left of the alien it said THERE and to the right of the alien it said HERE. As in THERE 👽 HERE.

THERE 👽 HERE. What did this mean? As in over THERE as compared to right HERE? Was this hat attempting to give me directions?

Yet, the appearance of the little grey alien man suggested this man's hat was not giving me directions as much as it was telling me there were aliens among us. Was this implying that, for many people in a foreign land, the mastery of their new land's language is almost never total?

Or was the hat a dead giveaway that this man, with his possibly appropriated tattoos, was in fact an alien himself? The obvious grammatical error a neon sign that he was one of the thems among us?

Or was he an English major at the local college who found the obviously flawed cap ironic? And he wore it proudly as a marker of his own smug intelligence?

Or was he actually that dumb?

I studied his face. He stared vacantly at the wall, his smile empty but wide. He kept touching the lower back of the girl, almost robotically. He looked like he might not have a lot going on under that hat. But he also looked like he might be an alien entity wearing the skin of a human, although without the nuanced mastery of the charade. (Perhaps this was the reason for the sling?)

He also looked like a twenty-year-old who was up early on a Sunday and needed coffee.

It's nice to know, there are still mysteries in the world, even if some of those mysteries are of a grammatical nature.