Laurie sat at the same table in the same coffee shop every morning, 9am on the dot, with her laptop perched at just the right angle to avoid the incoming glare from the sun.

Everyone who frequented this particular coffee shop knows that, from between 9am and 12pm, this table was Laurie’s, and that she was hard at work writing a novel. They knew nothing else about her, and had spoken no more than general salutations to her, if and when they happened to find Laurie’s face not glued to her screen, a look of concentration wrinkling her 20s-something skin.

The new owner of the coffee shop, who had been running the establishment for a little over two years, was not able to say how long Laurie had been coming here to write. Long before he started, and likely long after he had moved on to greater things himself, or at least that’s what he liked to tell the customers who asked. He didn’t mind that Laurie took up one of his tables every day, as he himself had tried to write a novel once, and knew how hard and lonely it was.

Laurie continued to write each day, lost in the world that she was drawing from the fibres of her ever-pulsing imagination, a kaleidoscope of ideas. But though she found peace and solace and pride in her very important work, she was beginning to feel lonely. She often wished that another writer would come and join her, at least just to sit at a nearby table so that she knew she wasn’t alone in what she was doing. Or, even better, if one of the many writers who she admired so, and whose pictures were taped to the back of her laptop for inspiration, would walk in one day and sit with her.

She liked this idea so much that she wrote about one of her favourite writers appearing and joining one of the characters in her novel, a 20-something woman not unlike herself who spent every morning at a coffee shop not unlike the one she was in now writing a novel that never seemed to end.

And then, as though life was taking a cue from the words that she was writing, the same author she had placed in her story appeared at the coffee shop and sat down across from her, a notebook and pen in hand.

And every day at the same time, this author would come and write, just as Laurie was writing, the two of them weaving worlds that spiralled around each other, but never touched.

After word got out that a famous author was coming to the same coffee shop each day, other writers began to flock here, like a flurry of regal flamingoes. They would come in and write their own stories, adding to the tapestry of words and ideas that hung above the coffee shop like a magnificent multi-coloured rug.

No one spoke to each other, but there was a silent knowing that they were following the same path, their energies guiding the collective to write the most incredible stories any of them had ever written.

Laurie never finished her novel, though she was happy not to. She was content coming back here day after day, doing the thing she loved, in a community that she had built from the power of her words.