Coffee

Hours I spent standing at the end of a pier on Lake Michigan. I set my back against a concrete wall so that I was invisible to the humans on the shore, and stared out straight ahead so that all I could see was blue horizon. Waves and clouds were perpetually unfurling toward me but never quite reaching. I felt like I could stand there forever, weathering the frigid winds like a carved face on a totem pole.

At the base of the wall behind me was srawled this message:

"you can put out the fire that started at the but you can't put out leaves when they burn in autumn"

I realized that the numbness in my toes had crept up the length of my legs. I decided to walk.

"Do you have coffee?"

"Yes."

Her simple response meant so much more to me than she could know. To her I was just another New Year's day hangover. To me she was my first reconnection with the community of humans in some 36 hours.

The simple phenomenon of being able to slap my lips, tongue, and teeth together, while exhaling, in a way so as to perfectly communicate my desire for a very specific object. A verbal magic trick, like pulling a dime from behind her ear.

She arrived at my table and she served me the object. I could see the coffee; my eyes vouched for its existence. My nose was useless, the odor of the cup cast adrift on a background sea of scent: an ebb and flow of eggs, beans, sweat, pork, farts, halitosis; pumped through the cramped diner with every breath of its patrons, like a galley full of steadily rowing slaves.

I picked up the cup and I felt its warmth radiate through Styrofoam and skin and hair and tissue and it warmed my bones.

I tried to thank her but I couldn't express it. So I drank my cup and when it was empty I went up to the counter and asked quietly, humbly, for another cup of coffee.

"What?"