I am writing this because a cafe I spent a good chunk of my adult life in is closing. I know in the grand scheme of things, this sounds very insignificant. But these things matter. These places matter.

Glazer’s Coffee has been a fixture of the Moiliili area for as long as I can remember. It has been a haven for UH students, professors, and general community members to do work, have deep, intellectual conversations, or just hang out over a cup of Joe.

I remember times when, deeply involved in writing my thesis, I would spend the entire day there. They didn’t serve any real food aside from sweets and bagels so I adapted by bringing a Tupperware full of sandwich insides that I could stick into a bagel when I got to the shop.

When the plan was successful, it became a beautiful bagel sandwich; an amazing upgrade to a plain bagel, and I would show the barista my new creations. When I came on a day when they ran out of bagels … well, I was stuck eating sandwich insides for lunch.

But it wasn’t always work, although a lot of my time there was. It was who I went there with that gave life to that place, too. My best friend from Korea had spent a semester at UH Manoa while I was still a student there, and we would go to this cafe and talk nonstop over chai lattes and madelines until almost 10 p.m.

That was back before Covid when the shop stayed open that late. I remember at night the place looked like a different world, with its warm lighting and colorful photos and paintings on the walls, the jazz music playing, and the browns of the wooden floor and furniture making the place feel like home.

I’m writing this because I’m tired. Yes, I may be more sentimental than your average person. Things that for me are a huge loss feel like nothing to the person next to me more often than I’d like to admit, which makes my feelings for most things in the world feel largely unrequited.

But disregarding all of that, I’m just tired. Tired of familiar places and faces having to disappear because leases are too high or franchises move in or a new development is being built. Tired of gathering places being pushed to the wayside because “people can just buy their coffee somewhere else.”

Never again will the same people gather in this same place and share their mutual presence together. A little community, gone. That in itself is sad enough.

But I am tired because this happens again and again, and we cannot afford to keep letting this happen or else what is the character of this place anymore? Who are our neighbors? That person walking across the street?

When places that once felt like home become unrecognizable, something is wrong.

This all is, of course, rooted in issues much bigger than just the loss of a single favorite cafe. The sky-rocketing price of land in Hawaii, the equally high cost of living here, encroaching outside corporations, the gentrification of old neighborhoods, a growing diaspora, housing struggles.

These all may seem to be separate issues, but all of them feed each other, and all of them make a sense of community harder and harder to maintain in a place like Hawaii where we are supposed to be kamaaina — children of the land.

How does one become a child of the land if the land is constantly changing?

Being handed from one owner to the other, being developed and demolished, being paved over and valued for its monetary value rather than for the fact that it is aina — that which feeds and nourishes us. I am tired, tired of seeing my favorite cafes disappear, but also tired of the overwhelming waves of monied change that are constantly eroding away our shores.

We all need nourishment, and we can only have it by holding on to spaces where communities are built, not broken.