Night Cafés and the Creatures That Keep Them Company
There used to be a café I liked to write in at night. It no longer exists except in the soft architecture of memory. It wasn’t remarkable in daylight just a busy local cafe but after dark, it changed as most cafés do. They loosen. They breathe differently. The hum of the espresso machine becomes a kind of heartbeat, the shadows lengthen, and the people who drift in seem to belong to a slightly different world.
Night cafés are liminal by nature. They’re thresholds disguised as businesses. They collect the ones who can’t sleep, the ones who think better in the half light, the ones who feel most themselves when the rest of the city has gone quiet. I always felt that it was possible that something supernatural could happen at a café table at 11:47 p.m., with a cooling cup of coffee and a notebook open like an invitation.
Maybe that’s why the idea for The Night Café found me there. A café with an accord, an understanding, with the monsters that only come out after dark. Not a battleground, not a sanctuary, but a negotiated space. A place where the creatures of the night can exist without hunting, and the humans who wander in can exist without fear, as long as they respect the rules. Every good café has rules, after all. Some are just older than others.
When I think of that lost café now, I imagine it as the prototype. The first draft. A place where the veil was already thin. The kind of place where you could almost believe that the shadows in the corner were listening. That the building itself was keeping watch. That the night had its own patrons.
Sadly it’s closed now, but the feeling remains. And maybe that’s the real magic of night cafés, they vanish, but they leave their ghosts behind. They become the soil where new stories take root.
My upcoming novel The Night Café is my way of honouring the hours I spent writing under dim bulbs and listening to quiet jazz music, surrounded by strangers who felt like characters waiting to be written. It’s a love letter to the nocturnal, the uncanny, and the quiet pact between humans and the dark.
And maybe, somewhere in the story, that old café will find its way back into the world.
