The past, the present.

The table I'm sitting at is actually an old sewing machine, Music from the 80s is playing from the speakers, hung in the corners of stained and scratched walls. Through the windows, high as the ceiling and divided into squares by steel bars, I see double-deckers passing by in the windy and semi-desert street. Here, in the Beyond Retro Café, chairs and tables don't match with each other at all - they all must come from different places and eras. The stained ceiling, the wooden column in the middle of the room covered with naive plastic plants and the squared glasses at the windows covered with smokey panels convey anything but the idea of being in a warm or clean place. But yet, after a first weird and confused impression, I immediately feel at home. Free to sit here, in the middle of the café, sipping a cappuccino and crumbling my croissant all over the table and floor. The vintage clothes shop is just one step from me while I am here, thinking about past and future. I love these kind of places where there isn't one thing that matches with the other. In the café, as in the clothes store, there aren't two items which look the same. But yet I feel a great harmony all around. There are hundreds of dresses and shirts hung up: dotted, striped, flowered ones. If you took them one by one, they probably won't even make any sense. But as I peep through the door from the table I'm sitting at, all the dresses and shoes and shirts and jackets look like there's a perfect harmony among them. 

The Beyond Retro store from the Café.

Vintage is a way to keep the past alive. It's an expensive way to keep on dressing up as our parents used to do in the '70s and '80s. Suddenly, something brings me back to the present: a small blackboard with a colorful chalk writing - "Free WiFi". Here I am, thinking about the past: it seems as if we put all our efforts in trying to leave our past apart. We store up dismissed clothes in boxes or give them away as we are sure they'll never fit us again. Then, after a while, we spend lots of money in vintage stores to set our closets back into the '80s. What's in the while? In the while there's the present. The truthful effort to move on standing on our own feet. We think it's easy to hide the past in some sort of memory boxes and it's done. So confident that we wouldn't need them anymore. What if one day we have to face them all again? Then, the price is higher. If we had kept all these clothes well stored in a proper closet, with patience and care, it would be now costless to wear them again. And so I believe it is the same as with memories. Let them be with us day by day and when we'll realize how precious they are, they'll still be there, unwasted and free. Maybe the most of them won't match which each other, but who cares? The whole soul and mind would feel in harmony - and this, to me, is priceless.