Tryst, my love, it's me!

Dear Tryst,

I am so excited to be together again. It was several years ago that we first met and fell in love, me with your big windows, mangy furniture, and brazen exposed brick (have you no shame!). So many lovely first dates, late nights, and lazy mornings. And even as you became the Adams Morgan cliche, the name DC transplants would drop to sound in the know, I stuck by you.

But then. after an especially long and loving night, I awoke the next morning with a cough. It was a short cough, as if i had a piece of animal cracker scratching my throat. An hour later, I was sipping water. The next day, still coughing. chest hurting. It was your smoke, dear Tryst, that clogged my lungs and left me hacking. It was the crowds and crowds of smokers cozy like Cubans puffing away.

Faced with the choice, my lungs or Tryst, I had to cut you loose. Turn down invitations to meet friends there and look like the loser who couldn't be hip if you paid her. I had to do it.

But tonight, my love, we're reunited. In celebration of your Spring, there are Gerber daisies atop the tables, beckoning me with a friendly "We can breathe!" There is a single cigarette in sight. And she's putting it out. To us.

With a blended chai,
Rhonda