coffee in the morning

it’s saturday, so no school. i wake up naturally on the top bunk of the two tier wooden bed i share with my sister. i can hear the low mumble of my parents chattering to each other in the great room. and i smell their coffee, wafting through the whole house like an emissary of morning. it’s by no means my first memory, but it is one of those ones that exists a hundred times, until they all rush into a single pressing version. like saving up all the carbon copies of a saturday morning and laying them on top of one another until they become a perfect whole. memory, stacked until it presses itself past individuality into archetype.

if there was the low mumbling, no raised voices, everything was ok. we were fine. no one was angry. the assurance of peace is a beautiful thing to wake up to when it’s not a given. peace, and coffee. so my mind worked the trick where coffee guaranteed the peace, or stood in for it. until coffee became the thing that calmed and soothed me, a synecdoche for all the gratitude i felt waking up to their content voices. like many things in my life, i consume coffee for access to this emotion, not for the flavor or the caffeine. i eat and drink emotionally, not to hide emotions, but in an attempt to reach the ones that each beverage or bite is linked to. strong coffee in the morning is a (weak) promise that there will not be pain today, that everything will be peaceful. so i call myself addicted to it. i drink it habitually and with relish. i am building a safe world for myself out of mugfuls of mud. perhaps peace can be reached one sip at a time, a daily habit born from sacred memory.