other lives
She sits by the window like she owns the light.
Most Saturdays after church, I walk over to Vinateria, a neighborhood spot in Harlem that feels like an extension of home. Faye, the owner, is almost always there — seated at the front by the bar, where the sunlight hits just right. It’s her perch. Her post. She watches the room like someone who’s seen it all, but still wants to see more.
Faye is in her eighties. Jamaican, like my family. Elegant in a way that doesn’t ask for attention, just commands it. She wears her silver hair pulled back, always with something soft at the collar — a scarf, a flower, a detail. We’ve been having these small, beautiful conversations for years now. She’s become a kind of mentor to me — not formally, just steadily. A presence.
Yesterday I told her how the brownstone renovation is taking longer than I thought. That I live alone. She looked over her glass and said, “I couldn’t imagine living alone. I never have.”
She met her husband at a candy store in Harlem when she was 18. “A candy store,” I said, smiling. She laughed, “Yes, well… you all don’t meet in candy stores anymore.”
There was no judgment in her voice. Just love. Just difference. And that moment stayed with me — how lives can run parallel and never touch, and still meet each other with reverence.
There are women whose lives I can’t imagine living. And there are women who can’t imagine mine. That truth doesn’t pull us apart. It lets us sit together, right here, by the bar, with cocktails and quiet wisdom, trading stories as the light shifts.
Faye often speaks about the importance of having something that’s yours — a home, a space, a name on a deed. “Especially for us West Indian women,” she’ll say, not as a point of pride, but a point of purpose. She reminds me that what we’re building — the spaces, the stories, the sense of self — is worth the time it takes.
At the end of our brunch, her husband always pulls up to take her home. There’s something so tender in that gesture. The consistency of it. The decades behind it. She moves toward him slowly, not out of fragility, but grace.
It’s a rhythm I’ve never lived. And I honor it. Just as she honors mine.
These moments — these Saturday talks with Faye — ground me. Not because we are the same, but because we listen. Because we see each other. Because in a city that moves too fast, stillness sometimes looks like this: two women, across generations, seated at a bar in Harlem, laughing over love and home and candy stores long gone.
-L