Welcome to the café
where nothing sits straight
and every chair has tenure.

You enter through a blue rectangle
masquerading as a floor,
already slightly tilted
toward the nearest mistake.

In the center:
a red-backed chair,
thick and stubborn,
wearing a black outline
like a heavy winter coat.

It leans toward a yellow table
that cannot decide
whether it is a table,
a runway,
or the preface to a manifesto.

Above, black lines swarm—
not beams, not cables,
more like overcaffeinated thoughts
trying to hold the ceiling in place.
They crisscross, intersect, hesitate,
forming a nervous system
for this room that keeps forgetting
its own floor plan.

A turquoise rectangle hangs in the air,
swinging from dark strings.
Lamp? screen? aquarium for light?
It glows with the smug calm
of a device that has already
refused three software updates.

The yellow of the wall behind it
slices diagonally into the scene
like a spotlight that took method-acting
a little too seriously.
This light does not illuminate;
it interrogates.

“State your purpose,”
it asks the table.
“Surface,” the table replies.
“State your purpose,”
it asks the chair.
“Resistance,” the chair says,
and creaks with ideological satisfaction.

On the left,
a cascade of grey panels
pretends to be windows.
They are not transparent,
only slightly softer walls,
like bureaucrats who smile
without changing policy.

Between them,
thin columns of blue and brown
hold up a horizon we never see.
Perhaps there is a city outside,
perhaps it’s just more crayons
waiting in the box.

This café is built entirely
from half-remembered geometry.
Angles come here to retire.
Triangles stretch out,
parallelograms unbutton their edges,
circles sneak in disguised as coasters
and gossip about the straight lines.

Your coffee has not arrived yet,
but the chair you’re about to sit on
has already judged your life choices.

It knows,
for example,
how many unfinished emails
you are carrying in your pockets,
how many tabs of gentle panic
are open behind your eyes.

The red in the backrest
is not just a color;
it is a measuring device
for invisible tension.
The more you lean,
the deeper it glows.

At the next table,
which might also be this table—
space is unionized here—
a set of yellow planes
holds a meeting about gravity.

Minutes of the meeting:

1. Gravity has been working overtime
   on shoulders and expectations.
2. Proposal to redirect
   20% of its effort
   from bodies to cutlery,
   so spoons will feel the burden
   for once.
3. Adjourned when a fork
   fell off the edge of the drawing
   and refused to come back.

The black outlines
act as union representatives,
thickening wherever protest increases.
They march around chair legs,
brace the table,
tie the lamp to the ceiling
with decisive strokes.

Sometimes they break rank
and go wandering,
adding extra angles
where no object exists,
like rumors of furniture
that might appear
if the rent ever gets cheaper.

In the lower right corner,
a set of blocky grey stairs
tries to climb into the picture.
They make it two steps up,
then freeze,
caught between ambition and shading.

No one uses them.
People in this café
prefer to ascend
through digressions.

On the floor,
blue puddles of maybe
reflect nothing in particular.
They are fragments of sky
that escaped the windows
and decided to holiday
at ankle height.

The café’s soundtrack
is composed entirely
of invisible hands drawing:

scritch—pause—scritchscritch—
marker squeak—
cap click—
micro silence.

Each sound leaves a trace,
a small decision
in the architecture of confusion.

A regular customer,
an invisible sociologist,
comes here to take field notes
on how chairs negotiate identity.

She writes:

Chair No. 1 identifies as
“support structure with trust issues.”
Refuses to be stacked.
Exhibits strong commitment
to local red community.

Table reports repeated microaggressions
from laptop users:
“They keep occupying my surface
without emotional investment.”

Lamp asserts nonbinary status
between object and idea,
demands to be called The Suspended One.

The café manager is never seen,
only implied
by the presence of rules
no one fully understands:

— Every line must eventually hit something.
— Shadows are optional,
but highlights are mandatory.
— No straight path
from entrance to counter;
patrons must zigzag philosophically.

Somewhere in the unseen kitchen,
a pig-shaped timer ticks,
keeping count of brewing time and absurdity.
It never enters the frame—
this time we stay with picture,
not pigture—
yet each tock adds
a faint oink of possibility
to the air.

You sit—
or try to—
on the red-backed problem
that calls itself a chair.
Your body finds an approximation of comfort,
your elbows seek alliances
with yellow planes,
your thoughts climb the black scaffolding
toward the dangling turquoise rectangle.

For a brief moment
everything aligns:

the lamp glows
exactly in your direction,
the table forgets to be anxious,
the chair allows you
one unnegotiated exhale.

In that instant,
the café becomes
a functional piece of reality,
almost ordinary,
almost ergonomic.

Then the lines twitch,
the colors shuffle their hierarchy,
and you realize
this was only a rehearsal
for coherence.

The room returns
to its true vocation:
being a diagram of everyday life
drawn by somebody
who mistrusts rulers
but believes deeply
in the power of outlines.

Your coffee still hasn’t arrived.
But somehow you feel
strangely awake.