There's a café I go to and a particular table at it, a two-top in the corner by the window, and if someone else is in it I'm faintly unsettled the whole time I'm there.
This is not a remarkable café. The coffee is good and not the best. I go because of the table, and because of what I can see from the table, which is a stretch of ordinary street I've now watched long enough that it's started teaching me things.
The plane tree out front has gone bare and filled back in twice since I claimed the seat. I've watched the whole cycle from this chair: the leaves going, the bare months when you can see the brick of the building behind it, the green coming back so gradually you can never catch the day it actually happens. People talk about wanting to travel to see the world. I've seen one tree very thoroughly, and I'm not sure I've got less out of it than they have.
Things change on the street, slowly, and I'm one of the few people sitting still enough to notice. The hardware store across the way became a phone-repair place, which felt like a small sad joke about something I couldn't quite name. Dev, who made my coffee for two years and knew my order and once told me about his sister's wedding in great unprompted detail, left to train as a nurse. The new person is perfectly nice and doesn't know my order yet, and I haven't told her, because there's a small pleasure coming in being known again that I don't want to rush.
I think you learn more from returning to one place than from collecting new ones, though I'd struggle to prove it to anyone. A new place gives you a great deal at once and then nothing. The same place gives you almost nothing each time and then, over years, quite a lot. I've cast my lot with the corner table. The street is in no hurry to finish telling me whatever it's been telling me, and lately neither am I.