Best Coffee in DC
A caffeinated spiral down life after soccer
Shortly after I moved to Washington, DC, a bright pink Post-it® note taped to the pastry cabinet in a coffee shop that read “Best Coffee in DC, 1985!” caught my attention. I’d been feeling lost ever since I stopped playing competitive soccer because for the first time I could remember, I’d gone months without a sporting goal to chase. I wasn’t prepared for the conversations in past tense about the passion that had held a controlling interest in my identity for two decades. I played soccer.
I briefly dampened this feeling that I had become unmoored by signing up for a half marathon, but I couldn’t shake the itch to do something big, something monumental, something better than I had ever done before.
And then I saw that note. “Best Coffee in DC, 1985!” The questions immediately churned in my brain. Who ran the competition? What did this store do forty years ago to make the best coffee in DC?1 Why haven’t they won again since?
There was one question I wanted an answer to more so than the rest: why was the note declaring this victory still up, forty years later?
My thoughts spiraled like sugar dissolving in the arc of a spoon’s stir as I left the store, award-winning coffee in hand. I wondered whether I had already done the “biggest” thing that I would do, whether from here on out everything would pale in comparison to the milestones that mark the path behind me, stale breadcrumbs from moments long past. I missed the buzz of a locker room before a big game, the thrill of hearing the final whistle to signal a hard-fought 1-0 win, the delight of seeing my name on a team list that I’d worked so hard to be on. I wondered if I would feel like that again. What, forty years from now, would I write on a pastry-cabinet Post-it® note declaring the biggest achievements of my life? And have all these moments passed already?
I thought about the note every now and again in the months that that followed. Each time, I felt the jump scare of existential dread and accompanying guilt of not maximizing every second of my time on this earth. But then my life after soccer started to calibrate.
The gym became a source of joy again. I didn’t need to feel like I was getting faster, fitter, or stronger—reducing stress, having fun, and moving my body was enough. Put another way, I still felt a sense of achievement even when I didn’t end up curled on the floor or vomiting into a trash can (which is how I ended more than one soccer practice).
I rediscovered activities that didn’t have an end goal, like reading for fun, and devoured offbeat novels about sad people who find and love other sad people. I relaxed (kind of) and worked on building time into my day that didn’t need to feel productive. I went months without signing up for a half marathon.
But most importantly, my “wins” started to look different. I didn’t need to be on a soccer field scoring bangers—not that I did that often anyway. Finally made that dentist appointment I’d been putting off? Win. Spent time on a hobby I’d been meaning to get back into? Win. Called a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while? Win. A slow Sunday morning with my partner and a pot of coffee (or two)? The biggest win of the week.
I sometimes still wonder what experiences I’ve missed out on by giving up on soccer. In those moments, I feel guilty for having put so much time and resources into it and just deciding that I was done. But then I remind myself that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the sport and the people it brought into my life. That time wasn’t wasted. The fact that I stopped playing doesn’t negate everything that soccer gave me. I can miss it and still feel okay about my decision to hang up my boots when I did.
I made peace with the fact that I’ll likely never seek another championship to write on a Post-it® note in forty years, if I’m lucky enough to reach my sixties.
I recently went back to that coffee shop. It had been refurbished—pastry cabinet and all—and there was a new note with the same phrase, but in different handwriting. The letters were spaced slightly closer together:
BestCoffeeinDC1985!
It was the Wi-Fi password.
I’m grateful for this existential third-of-life crisis, even if it was brought on by a combination of capital letters, numbers, and special characters.
My first thought was their use of frozen coffee as ice cubes in their iced coffee. Genius.