An Ode to Black Coffee
My brain is soft, unformed. Before the Vyvanse constructs the architecture of my day, I am merely waiting for a catalyst.
I stand before the machine. A ten-dollar plastic relic, thrifted and tired, caked in the residue of a hundred mornings I was too lazy to scrub away. It gurgles.
This four-dollar blend was on sale. I have cultivated a taste for the bottom shelf; it requires less of me.
A primate itch. I scratch between my butt cheeks and bring my fingers to my nose. A sharp, captivating whiff of self. Why does the organism love its own stink? I know it is foul, yet it is tolerable, more so captivating because it is mine. (I wash my hands, washing away the evidence of the animal).
The cheap coffee drips. It smells like my parents. It smells like the illogical ritual of 8:00 PM caffeine, drinking the darkness just to go to sleep. My mother, justified by the night-shift hospital lights, while my father and I drank just to be near her, swallowing wakefulness for the sake of company.
The cup fills. It absorbs the kitchen light. Dark, with brown edges. A liquid iris. The void stares back at me. Smoke rises. “Stay,” I tell the dog. Do not burn your tongue on my dread.
Heat transfer dictates in silence while I chew my breakfast.
I sip. Watery. This grind was not meant for this machine. Tannins coat the throat, a chemical fur. The bold and the bitter, I’m used to. Logic insists on the light roast--the caffeine is denser there--but I choose the dark roast. I prefer the aesthetic of the heavy.
Will this liquid void grant me willpower? Will it synthesize fulfillment? Or maybe reveal a new axiom?
To appreciate it is to mock my own palate. This was supposed to be a love letter, but perhaps it is just an external completion of my subjectivity.
I look at the cup, and I feel the weight of the invisible. The laborer who picked the cherry, the hands that ground the bean, the packaging sealed in a factory I will never see, the part-time student with dead eyes stocking the shelf.
The abstraction of labor dissolves. The coffee confronts me as a nauseating commodity. An alien object. Does it gaze at me? Does it want to speak? Is taste its language?
Would I even feel this weight if I were not alone? If there were another mouth to kiss, to share the bitterness of coffee breath? To be alone is to be deafened by one’s own internal noise. To be quiet with myself has become a dreadful impossibility.
The caffeine arrives. Is this the beginning of production, or the start of a violent procrastination? An Up or a Down? Another aimless rotation of the sun.
To live, to simply live and halt this sickening search for meaning, is truly the rarest thing of all.
My stomach churns. The liquid moved right through me. I will go to the bathroom for the second time this morning. A waste of time. A waste of coffee. A waste of me.