Hi all.
Man here, hope this is okay.
So I am a university student who had a morning off the other day, and thought I would go and grab a coffee at the Costa in our local shopping centre. Had my phone with me and thought I would sit and watch a few TikTok's and videos and generally relax.
I walk through the entrance, which is open-plan, as it is in a shopping centre so you can simply walk in and out, am sure you have seen the type. I walk in and look for a free table, there a few mums with buggies chatting and older couples, typical for this kind of day in coffee shops.
I find a free table and sit facing inwards towards the cafe, and the majority of the tables, and from the minute I sit down I notice this young woman looking at me (she is facing outwards on a single table, I am facing inwards a few tables down) but we are clearly in each other's eye line despite the other tables around us full of people.
From the minute we made eye contact I couldn't help but notice how beautiful she was. Being honest with you, once our eyes met I felt these amazing butterflies inside and almost felt slightly giddy! I can't remember the last time I felt this way looking at a woman.
Anyway, I add sugar to my coffee and begin to eat my cake, sitting and scrolling on my phone, and a couple of minutes later I look up and scan the room aimlessly, and in doing so our eyes meet again. Neither of us smiled (I was definitely too nervous to) but I just felt something. Our eyes met and neither of us looked away, or looked freaked out, or anything like that, it just felt like we were both experiencing "a moment`".
She was sitting working on her laptop, I am assuming she was a uni student as she looked a similar age to me, but could also be working (not as a student, I only make that assumption as it is a student town and her age, which looked similar to mine).
As the minutes go by, and I eat my cake and drink my coffee, it just seemed that more and more, we were taking every opportunity to make eye contact across the room. A couple of times I pretended to just be looking around, but in reality was trying to make eye contact, and every time our eyes met, they met. Neither of us looked away instinctively.
If anyone has ever had a moment like this before, you will relate to my thought process of "how can I approach her? Will I never see her again?" We made eye contact a few more times again as I was finishing my coffee and begun a phone conversation with a family member, and this time I physically blushed. She didn't , but I would be surprised if she didn't notice!
Midway through the phone conversation, I looked up for her again, and we had another few-second moment. Little did I know this would be the last time - as the person I was on the phone with asked me to read something from a book I had with me, and whilst doing this I did not notice that she had finished her coffee and food, had packed her laptop up, and had left.
Due to the time of day, if she was a uni student, it is likely that she was on her way there.
However, in hindsight, I do wonder whether or not you feel we had a connection. Obviously 'love at first sight' is impossible as we don't know each other, however I truly believe we had a connection you don't have with the vast majority of strangers you see.
If that was the case, and she liked the look of me too, I can't think of how either of us could have approached each other in a busy Costa setting? How could that have happened?
This whole situation happened over the course of 45 minutes or so.
Whatever it was or it wasn't, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it over the past few days and hope that we will see each other in some future context if anything was meant to be.
Enjoy the sunshine everyone!