I’m sitting in the cubicle of my first 9 to 5 longing for the coffee I can no longer drink. After being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, my doctor prescribed a list of foods to avoid as a hopeful solution to my self-destructive condition, including coffee. Two years later and I’m finally cutting ties with my old friend.
I sip black tea now instead, an option I used to enjoy when it wasn’t the only one available to me. My hands are warmed by a round, off-white mug displaying the slanted letters of my new company’s logo across the front. I dislike generic office mugs with the same affinity I have for yellow legal pads and blue BIC pens; I feel so suffocated by it all.
It’s moments like these that I wish I could drink coffee like the last man I loved. His recipe was simple: one part coffee, two parts sugar, three parts heavy cream. I envied the ease of his morning routine and knew I would never be able to make it my own. But for him, coffee was a simple, sweet ritual for which he gave no second thought. Unlike the man I loved before him, who only bought whole beans imported from faraway places like Kenya or Guatemala or Seattle, he was as happy with coffee from 7/11 as he was from a cafe full of college students taking aerial photos of gluten-free pastries and latte art. While I had to confine my coffee drinking to the morning, and never on an empty stomach, there was no rhyme or reason to his coffee consumption. Some days he needed four cups to get by; other days he went without.
After we broke up, we walked around the arts district of our small southern city drinking cold brew one Friday night. He ordered it as a pick-me-up; I ordered hoping it’d make our night never end. By then he had returned to someone else, a fact that I was painfully aware of even when it was just us two. We never said her name; if it weren’t for social media she wouldn’t exist. I couldn’t help but wonder if she knew how frequently we saw each other. I couldn’t help but wonder if she knew about the hours we spent exploring historic hotels and reading illegible love letters at antique shops on 81. I couldn’t help but wonder if she knew that every time he left, I wasn’t sure if I would see him again.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she felt the same way.
Months after my last love and I broke up, I found myself drinking coffee at a nearby art museum as I had done with him countless times before. On a whim, I poured milk (almond) and sugar (stevia) into my cup before walking to a record store down the street. I called my father on my way, as I do most days. He stopped drinking coffee years ago. Though it served him well in his radio days, at sixty-four years old the caffeine jitters are too much. I was overjoyed the morning I took him to my favorite coffee shop and he ordered a latte (decaf) to pair across from my coffee black. We talked for an hour about nothing before he got in his car and said goodbye.
On the phone, I told him about the cup of milky, sugary coffee I was having. “Careful,” he warned. “Coffee that sweet is easy to get addicted to.”
I often wonder if “addiction” is a better word to describe what I felt for another man years ago. Every morning he filled his mug with half coffee and half cold water, diluting the taste down to something you might find at a cheap diner in small town America that has been in business for 50 years. Not because its food is exquisite (it isn’t) and not because the service is exceptional (it doesn’t need to be) but because the people are good, the price is cheap, the AC is on, and after seven hours in the car eating nothing but peanuts and beef jerky you have nowhere else to go.
I can’t stand a lukewarm drink that’s meant to be hot; to me, it’s like smelling sunscreen on a cold winter day. But for him, taste and temperature were inconsequential because coffee was his fuel. It was a recharge to get him started for a productive day or to curb his appetite long enough to skip lunch and go on a run instead.
I used to run laps around the river with a man I was seeing but never committed myself to. He was from a small beach town in Italy and claimed no cup of coffee would ever compare to the espresso his Nona made when he visited home every summer. Whenever we tried a new coffee shop, he would order a cup to see if it would hold up to the standards of his hometown. It never did. He’d take one small sip before going on about how American coffee will never match that of Europe. He wasn’t wrong. I’ve never enjoyed coffee more than drinking it with a Polish man I met in a cafe in Porto, or the time I drank a cappuccino alone in Spain during a bus trip to the end of the world.
Now I sit alone in my cubicle fighting the urge to brew a cup of No Surrender, the tasteless Keurig brand my boss swears by. But I resist. I know if I drink it, I will be in pain for the rest of the day. My heart will churn and my stomach will burn and I will regret it almost instantly.
My phone dings. It’s a text from the man I used to love and haven’t spoken to in months. He asks me where I’ve been and why he hasn’t heard from me for so long. Is everything okay? What happened to us being friends? Do I want to get coffee sometime soon?
I want to respond. I want to make plans to meet at the corner cafe near my office downtown. We’ve never been there before, and it’s far away from any place we would run into someone we know, to someone he’s with. For an hour it would be just us two. For an hour we could talk about nothing and drink coffee until our cups feel full.
I put my phone on silent and sip lukewarm black tea instead.
