Three Shadows in "Enlightened Espresso" Café

I.

Three Shadows in "Enlightened Espresso" CaféHemingway, Borges, Kafka and the Eternal Question of the Right Filter for LifeI"Enlightened Espresso" Café, where every barista seemed to have completed a mindfulness course, and the prices hinted that enlightenment was not among life's cheaper pleasures.

Morning. The tables at "Enlightened Espresso" were polished to a shine with eco-friendly cleaning products, and each looked as if it had just stepped off the cover of a minimalist interior design magazine and was slightly judging you for your insufficient photogenic qualities.

The air was fragrant with a mixture of: freshly roasted coffee with notes of light snobbery, aromatic sticks of "sandalwood and irony of fate" (presumably), and the faint smell of ozone from countless laptops humming quietly, as if contemplating the next brilliant but utterly useless startup.

Hemingway occupied a table by the window overlooking the street, where people hurried about as if they were late for a clearance sale on the meaning of life. Before him lay a well-worn notebook, because in his opinion, thoughts printed in letters lose half their significance. He wasn't writing. He was grimly scrolling through something on his phone screen, which looked as though it could withstand a direct meteor hit or a fall from the bar counter—which, let's agree, was far more likely.

"Same old story," he thought. "Same words, only now with GIFs. Should be shorter. And without these... emojis of yours. A period at most."

He took a sip of his double espresso, strong as a blacksmith's handshake, with an expression as if checking whether they'd mixed in soy milk or, God forbid, positive thinking.

Borges materialized in the doorway with the grace of a well-tuned ghost that knew precisely the schedule of all tides and ebbs of human thought. His cane, elegant and dark, tapped quietly against the impeccably clean floor, as if beating out the rhythm of some invisible cosmic poem.

He sat across from Hemingway as if this spot had been marked in his personal guidebook to metaphysical realities. A waiter—a young man with an infinity tattoo on his wrist and eyes full of universal melancholy or simple sleep deprivation—brought him bergamot tea without asking, as if it were written into his karmic contract.

"Did you update the firmware of existence today?" inquired Borges, his eyes behind his glasses looking somewhere through Hemingway, possibly at the reverse side of being.

"More like tried to remove malware," grumbled Hemingway. "And you? Wandering through the archives of the collective unconscious again?"

"I merely restructured the narrative," Borges replied serenely. "And imagine, the ending acquired an entirely new shade of uncertainty. It's always that way with endings—they're like the horizon: eternally beckoning, eternally elusive."

They fell silent. The silence was such that you could hear dust particles settling on perfectly smooth surfaces. Then, as if by some secret signal transmitted directly to the brain (or perhaps they simply received notifications simultaneously), they exchanged glances, and then each opened something on his device, showing it to the other. Their faces remained impenetrable, like poker players who had staked all their drafts.

II.

Kafka, or Personal Data of the Soul and Public Offer of Suffering

He appeared like a system glitch in the perfectly calibrated program of the day—quietly, almost imperceptibly, but evoking an inexplicable feeling that something was bound to go wrong right now. Thin, in an impeccably clean but obviously not new shirt buttoned all the way up, as if he were trying to keep inside something fragile and ready to crumble at the slightest draft.

He froze awkwardly at the entrance, as if checking against an invisible list of behavioral rules for public places of heightened consciousness, and sighed guiltily. This sigh contained all the world's unspoken "sorry"s. He removed his earphones, through which he was probably listening to a podcast about the futility of all existence.

"Are there... uh... no hidden conditions for... just sitting?" he whispered in a voice that seemed afraid to disturb the perfect acoustics of the establishment.

Hemingway grunted noncommittally. Borges made a barely perceptible gesture meaning something like "space is infinite, as are the variants of its interpretation, so please sit down." Kafka carefully, as if afraid of triggering some invisible alarm system, lowered himself into a chair. From his bag, resembling an archive of unresolved cases, he extracted a thin laptop and opened a document—several paragraphs of text flickering on the screen with the hesitation of a firefly.

"This is... a sketch," he announced, lowering his voice even further, as if it were a state secret. "About guilt. The kind that arises without apparent cause, like a pop-up window that cannot be closed. About a person who feels condemned, though the indictment is written in a language he doesn't understand."

Hemingway leaned toward the screen. His face tensed.

"Doesn't understand what for. And it's eating him alive. This is... inefficient. I'd prefer a firing squad. And no appeals."

Borges moved closer, peering at the text with the interest of a collector of rare butterflies.

"Ah, how curious," he murmured. "It's like a dream translated into the language of anxiety. Very accurately conveyed atmosphere of... hopeless bureaucracy of being. Almost unbearable. And therefore—surprisingly captivating."

Kafka said nothing. He stared into his cup of water (he never did work up the courage to order coffee), where at the bottom there was nothing but his own murky reflection.

III.

Three

They were silent. In this silence there was more left unsaid than in the comments under any controversial internet post. One believed in action—direct and uncompromising, like well-written code. The second—in symbol, multilayered and elusive, like the perfect metaphor. The third—that all of this, both action and symbol, and this café with its "conscious" menu, was just another level in a very complex game whose rules were constantly changing.

None of them possessed the ultimate Truth with a capital "T." And each was right in his own way, which, as is well known, makes choice even more agonizing, especially when you're trying to choose which series to watch in the evening.

Outside, the street was bustling—that endless stream of information and human destinies. Inside hung silence, weighty as an unsent message. Like a truth that everyone knows but no one dares to speak aloud, fearing it will lose its power when clothed in words.

Perhaps it was just a system glitch. Or debugging of a new patch for reality, written by a slightly tired Creator. Or all of this was happening simultaneously, because the Universe, as is well known, loves parallel processes.

But if Eternity suddenly needed voices to tell its story—not as a boring documentary, but as a gripping series with unexpected plot twists—it would probably choose precisely these three. If, of course, they could agree on genre and soundtrack.