To Coffee

This could be where we get that feeling of meeting for the first time again and the world’s exhausting gestures dissolve around us, but I’m starting to get nervous that you won’t show up. I know I asked for you because, if it’s a habit, then the sun habitually rises and your aroma habitually arouses. It’s just part of my nature to do so. The room’s accidental noises get louder and attack me more directly the longer I wait for you. I picture your gentle colour, the enthralling way you rock from side to side and the anxious shake that I cherish in my hand as I reach out to hold you, but a snippet of conversation interjects its cold reflection of your absence. Whatever swarms of words, heavy steps and cutlery clinks might try to do, though, I’ll always be battling to piece together some image of you in my head. Your form exists there like a rule my thoughts have to obey.

Seeing you arrive always has the captivating mystique of an introduction, but I’m blown further from the course of being myself every time. Everything about you battles more fiercely for my attention, more intricately obscures the possibility of ever having lived without you. I wake up with breath crawling into my lungs as if it had somewhere better to be, but I can carry it because I know I’m going to learn your name again. It’s been festering for too long now and I’m running out of ways to entertain the trivial whims of oxygen. As soon as you get here, I’ll feel every cell in my body become infused with the smiling drive that brought you to me. I just have to wait a little longer. I’m starting to become conscious of aches in my limbs, memories of isolation that hover like flies and several other problems that I didn’t choose to have. The noises are still getting louder and your image is becoming simultaneously sharper and more distorted in my mind. The whole world is resolving into a vessel of grief for your touch, but I’ve asked for you. I know you’re going to be here soon, because these words would have no shape in a story where you won’t be. 

I care about a lot of things. If I could choose, I wouldn’t spend so much of my time thinking about just one of them. Some affections can become a framework to all of our other worries, though. That’s why my entire day conforms to your therapeutic shape. This morning, when routine dragged me into the light five minutes before my alarm had a chance, you were the first thing I thought about. I woke up wondering what thoughts would be passing through my head by the time I finally laid eyes on you again. It’s the same every morning, and every night when my eyes are closed I can tell in the reluctant wilt of my limbs that I’m starting to want you again. Tonight, you’ll be the last preoccupation I postpone my sleep to indulge. It might seem excessive, but I can only imagine my days falling apart if I structured them around a form less intoxicating than yours. 

The noise in here is almost enough to sever me from my fantasies of holding you up to my lips, losing my mind in your smell and finding it again in an ecstatic draught that blunts every sharp edge in the room. When someone laughs, their abrasive cackles fall onto my head like rain, but I can’t escape and find shelter. Forgetting you isn’t an option. Nothing outside would hurt less than captivity under these burning artificial lights, because if I never see you again I’ll be buried with your name on my tongue. The streets may be crawling with imposters, around whose shapes I could learn to wrap my day, but none of them are sleek enough to fall between the cracks in my broken sleep. I could meet a new one for the first time every day and it would still teach me less than one brief waft of your enlightening scent. Someone shuffled quickly past the window, with their hands in their pockets and their head down, because it’s starting to rain. The weight on their brow was a phantom of that life without you. It’s one that I’ll never have to carry because of the shelter you’ve taught me to find in hidden corners of the day. They drew my eyes into a soothing field of drizzle, which allowed the fantasy to stay in focus while your vacant space took a merciful step backwards. 

In that ongoing daydream, you arrive decorated with sincere apologies for the delay, which I dismiss as if I hadn’t even noticed the wait. In effect, I really haven’t noticed it, because now that you’re here, that hollow torment is as far beyond recall as a face in the background of my dreams about you. I look at you like I’ve just landed on Earth and its oceans are shining their entire depth into my eyes. All of the ways this bustling room could hurt me are washed away in a warm, embracing tide. I can almost taste you just by thinking about that weightless moment of release, but the air still taints the back of my throat with its confusion of hostile voices and time that oozes in tangible excess. I can almost feel your warmth, because it’s beyond the scope of daydreams that soon it won’t become my own. Under this frightening deluge of seconds, though, nothing that’s soon feels certain. When you’re here, I won’t believe that anything at all happens soon, because every speck of hope that brightens my eyes belongs to that present. I’ll be too busy getting to know you again and losing myself in your charms. I’ll already be daydreaming of the next time I get to meet you.