Downtown Reno at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night

I'm so worn out I can barely keep my eyes open. Friends at the Sagebrush, notorious for causing all employees to forget the comforts of a night's sleep, are telling me I look unusually tired. My body will soon rebel if I don't rest soon. Right now, I'm not terribly busy and where am I? If you guessed curled up between the sheets, you're wrong. In fact, I'm at a 24-hour coffee shop in downtown Reno sipping a Mocha to stay awake. Why would I want to stay awake you ask? I have no idea, but I'm happy. Genuinely happy. I think my mind needs to unwind, something sleep just doesn't cut it for.
I'm sitting in this cafe downtown and I'm surrounded by things that make me love this city. Seeing as how this is the only moderately large city I've ever lived in, I'm not sure if it's any city or just Reno. That's not important though. Time to get back on track.
Right now I'm in an old brick building in an older district of downtown near the river. There's a wine bar conjoined to the building I'm in and a beautiful cathedral-style church across the street. It's a part of town with an artistic feel, and the people around me mirror that. There's Beatles music playing and for some reason it seems strangely fresh despite the fact I know all the words already. There's a couple of girls in the corner obviously in love and a young man bringing a girl to the end of a mid-week date. There's people reading, students working on homework and two construction workers stopping in for coffee (no idea why they're working this late). This place is genuinely alive at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night.
Of course, being Reno, this is all accompanied by the near constant din of sirens in the background and a faint neon glow from the skyline that is just barely blocked by the buildings. Also, being Reno, less than a block away the city feels much less inviting but that only seems to add to the charm of where I am. A sort of shelter in the dirty city, so to speak.
I can honestly not tell you what persuaded me to come here alone with my laptop to write this. It would have been just as easy to head home and unwind in a much more domestically comfortable way. Something tells me I wouldn't feel as at home as I do now, though.
I love Reno. I love cities. I love feeling like I'm surrounded by thousands of people I may never see again.
I want to hear what they have to say. I want to hear their stories and tell them mine. I want to know why they're in this coffee shop in downtown Reno at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night. I want to ask the girls in the corner about love and the girl who just walked in where she got her bag (an old-looking bag with a Pan American Airlines logo on the side). I want to talk politics with the man reading the news on his laptop and coffee with the woman behind the counter.
So there's that.