Hey rockstars,

This morning, I woke up “early” to stand in line for the grand opening of a Japanese stationery store.

This was not my idea. It was also not that early. It was like 11:15, and I had insisted we get coffee beforehand, so I was well stocked and had a decent amount of sleep. But still: early.

So, Katie had texted me that Orange Pocket was opening at Rio, an outdoor shopping center in Maryland that I have been going to since I was about three years old. “I think I’m gonna try to go to the Orange Pocket opening event at Rio!” she said. “They’re giving out cute free stuff.”

Obviously, I said I would go with her.

I have watched Rio change approximately one hundred times over the course of my life. There is a lake in the middle, surrounded by restaurants and stores, and those stores have turned over plenty of times as I’ve grown up alongside them. The particular space where Orange Pocket opened today used to be a Pier 1 Imports years ago. Since Pier 1 closed, the space has periodically spent its autumns doing what empty retail spaces across America apparently do best: becoming a Spirit Halloween.

And now it is a Japanese stationery store, and there we were on a Saturday morning, standing in an increasingly long line outside of it because Katie had been promised cute free things.

At various points, people walked or drove past and asked what everyone was waiting for. “Oh, it’s the grand opening of this stationery store,” we’d explain.

“You guys are crazy.”

okay.

Except standing there this morning, I realized that Katie and I have apparently done this before.

Almost exactly ten years ago, in October 2016, we woke up early and went to Silver Spring to stand in line for a Gilmore Girls coffee pop-up. Netflix had temporarily turned coffee shops around the country into versions of Luke’s Diner, and because Katie and I loved Gilmore Girls, naturally we needed to go.

Neither of us drove at the time, which makes the logistics of this substantially funnier in retrospect. We took the Metro to Silver Spring, walked to the coffee shop, discovered that the line extended several blocks away, walked past all of those people to find the end of it, and then voluntarily got in line.

What awaited us at the end of this journey, you ask?

A free cup of black coffee.

That was basically it. There were no actors waiting inside. There was no secret episode screening. Lauren Graham was not going to emerge and invite us to Stars Hollow. In fact, at one point, a random man stopped to investigate what could possibly have convinced this many people to stand on a sidewalk on a weekday morning: “So what are you guys in line for?” “Oh there’s a Gilmore Girls popup!” I responded. He responded enthusiastically, “Oh cool! So are the actors in there?” I said “No.”

I cannot remember his exact response, but I remember the energy of it perfectly: Oh. Okay…

Meanwhile, the people actually standing in line understood completely. The women around us were adults with jobs. One woman near us told us she had taken the morning off and needed to go to work afterward. Katie and I had classes. We had all apparently looked at our responsibilities for the day and decided that, yes, this was worth rearranging the morning for. For free black coffee.

I remember that morning so clearly. It was one of those crisp fall days that makes you understand why television shows are constantly trying to convince us that New England is the only place worth existing in October. I was wearing a poncho — I think ponchos had made a temporary comeback from 2004, but I don’t really particularly remember them being in-style, it was just convenient. We stood in line, got our coffee, went home, and later that day I took the bus back to college and went to class.

Nothing particularly important happened. The coffee was also only okay. But I remember the morning.

So there was something delightfully absurd about realizing, ten years later, that we had somehow recreated it. We are no longer college students. I did not wear a poncho. The weather, unfortunately, had abandoned the crisp-fall-day portion of the program and was simply hot. The destination had changed from a Gilmore Girls coffee pop-up to a Japanese stationery store, but the basic premise remained intact: Katie had identified a thing she wanted to do, I had agreed to do it with her, and now strangers were once again asking us why on earth we were standing in line.

To be clear, Katie cared considerably more about the Orange Pocket grand opening than I did. I love stationery. I love cute trinkets. I was perfectly happy to go. But would I, independently, have woken up to spend several hours standing outside a store for its grand opening? Absolutely not.

This was an act of friendship.

Katie knew this. In fact, as the sun climbed higher and the line moved at a pace that could generously be described as “technically forward,” she repeatedly gave me permission to abandon her. “This is my circus,” she kept telling me. “You can leave any time. It’s okay. You don’t have to stay for me.”

I would like to emphasize that I had driven us there.

By any reasonable interpretation of friendship law, my obligation had been fulfilled. I had woken up. I had gotten dressed. I had provided transportation. I had already spent approximately two hours standing in the heat. Katie even assured me that if I left, she would simply Uber home. She was offering me a complete and unconditional release from further performance.

And I considered it. There was absolutely a moment when I thought, Girl, I might just go home. Surely there was no additional loyalty to be proven through heat exhaustion outside a stationery store.

But then I thought: nah. I’m here. I committed. Let’s do it.

So we stayed.

At some point, Katie mentioned that people in line were supposed to be receiving giveaways, but we were far enough back that whatever was being distributed had apparently run out before reaching us. This struck me as inefficient. Why start every giveaway at the front of the line? Give the people who arrived earliest the nicest things, sure, but start distributing some of the smaller goodies farther back. Spread the joy. Manage your resources. We have options here.

This launched me into a four-minute rant about the inefficiency of lines. Very few people know how to run a line properly. The notable exception is Chick-fil-A. I have watched cars in a Chick-fil-A drive-through execute a level of zipper merging that I have never witnessed on an actual American highway. Two lanes become one with almost balletic precision. Everyone knows when it is their turn. The employees know where everyone is going. Food materializes. Traffic flows. Civilization is possible.

Almost every other line is absolute chaos.

I once spent an unreasonable amount of time at Universal Studios watching someone completely mismanage a single-rider line. This is a solvable problem! If a ride seats four people and your regular line contains a party of two, you send that party with two single riders. The next party of two gets two more single riders. A party of four gets the whole row. Repeat. Instead, this particular employee seemed to believe single riders should only be deployed when a party of three happened to appear in the regular line, leaving the rest of us standing there while perfectly usable seats went unfilled. I was incensed.

I explained all of this to Katie with the intensity of someone who had been retained to conduct an independent review of queue operations. For approximately four minutes, the inefficiency of lines bothered me substantially more than the heat did.

Then I finished my rant, and we went back to standing quietly next to each other.

The silence was occasionally interrupted by the strange temporary society that forms whenever a group of people has been waiting together long enough. At one point, an older woman approached me and asked whether she could give me her credit card so I could buy Pokémon cards for her grandson once I got inside.

This was very sweet.

It was also an objectively insane thing to ask a stranger.

“Oh, I just really don’t feel comfortable taking your card, I’m sorry!” I told her. She understood completely and walked away.

The two women behind us, who looked about our age and had now also been standing in line for roughly two hours, immediately turned to me.

“Girl, you are so nice. I would’ve been like, what?”

One said she’d been rolling her eyes through the entire interaction. The other laughed and joked, “Yeah, give me your card. I’ll use it to buy my own stuff.”

Their position was essentially that they had waited two hours and had exhausted their available generosity toward strangers attempting to circumvent the line. I couldn’t even disagree with the logic. I just kept laughing because the woman had seemed so harmless. I didn’t particularly care that she hadn’t waited in line. I just could not get past the more fundamental question: Why would you give me your credit card? You don’t know me.

Then, eventually, we went back to standing there.

The funny thing is that for a lot of those hours, Katie and I weren’t even talking. We’d had a painting party at her house yesterday, so we’d already covered most of the things we wanted to talk about. There was no backlog of life updates to work through and no three-hour heart-to-heart unfolding while we waited. Sometimes we talked about family, or star wars, or our friends. Sometimes we looked at our phones. And sometimes we just stood there next to each other, quietly existing.

It was never uncomfortable. The heat was uncomfortable. The line was increasingly uncomfortable. My decision to remain in the line became questionable at several points. But the silence between us never was.

I think there is something really lovely about reaching that point with another person. When you’re younger, friendship can sometimes feel like something you have to actively do. You make plans. You talk for hours. You tell each other everything. You measure closeness, at least partly, by how much there is to say. But eventually, with certain people, you accumulate enough shared life that being together stops requiring entertainment. You can spend the previous evening painting together, run out of updates, wake up the next morning, and then simply stand next to each other in the heat outside a Japanese stationery store.

And despite being perhaps the least enthusiastic person in our immediate section of the line, I loved the store once we finally got inside. It was full of stationery and tiny trinkets and all the little things I am normally delighted by.

And then, unexpectedly, I got emotional.

My Nana would have loved it. I could picture exactly how much fun he would have had looking at everything, and for a moment I felt that particular ache of discovering something you know someone you loved would have enjoyed and realizing they will never get to see it.

So even I found something waiting for me at the front of the line.

Maybe that is what struck me most about the strange little symmetry between 2016 and 2026. So much has happened in the ten years between those two lines. We are not the girls who stood outside a coffee shop in Silver Spring anymore. Our lives are different. We are different. Even the places around us keep changing. Pier 1 becomes Spirit Halloween becomes Orange Pocket. Stores open and close. Seasons pass. Ponchos, mercifully, leave the trend cycle.

And yet there are certain things that remain remarkably familiar.

Katie finds something slightly ridiculous that sounds fun. I say yes. We go.

I saw something on Instagram today that said, essentially, that nothing is embarrassing; we made that up, so go live. I have been thinking about that ever since, because there are so many small experiences we can talk ourselves out of because they seem silly, or inefficient, or not sufficiently “worth it.” Why stand in line for hours when you could buy coffee somewhere else? Why stand in line for a store that will still be there next week? Why spend a Saturday morning doing something strangers literally stop to tell you is crazy?

I don’t know. Because it sounded fun? Because your friend wanted to? Because sometimes that is enough?

The free coffee was never worth standing in line for. I’m sure whatever mathematical value I could assign to today’s giveaways would not justify the hours either. I even said “the amount of time I could have billed while standing in this line…” because my brain thinks in 6-minute increments now. But I still remember that morning in October 2016. I remember the weather. I remember the poncho. I remember Katie. I remember going home and getting on a bus later that day to go to class. Ten years later, the thing at the front of the line barely matters, but somehow the morning still does.

You don’t always need to know in advance whether something will be “worth it.” Sometimes you just show up for somebody else’s circus.

On the drive home today, Katie looked at me and said, “The next time we’ll stand in line is 2036.”

“Wait, for what?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’ll be in ten years.”

I don’t know what we’ll be standing in line for either. If history is any indication, it will probably be something neither of us actually needs. There will be some questionable giveaway involved. People will walk past us and ask what we’re waiting for, and at least one of them will think we’re ridiculous.

We’ll be ten years older. Whatever we’re standing in line for probably hasn’t even been conceived of yet. Our lives will contain things we cannot possibly know about now. Maybe we’ll talk the entire time. Maybe we’ll have already said everything we need to say and we’ll stand beside each other in comfortable silence. Hopefully it will be cooler outside.

But I hope she’s right.

And the next time some random stranger walks by, looks at the two of us, and asks, “Wait, why are you in line?”

I think I’ll finally have the right answer.

Well, because Katie’s here.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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