2. Coffee: my best friend and my ultimate foe
I vividly remember the first time I ever tried coffee. I was 12 years old and had stayed up all night running around eating candy at the Children’s Museum (it was an event where you could sleep over). I slept a total of four hours and my mother was furious.
“WHAT we’re you thinking?!” she barked as we fishtailed around a corner. “You were supposed to sleep. I told you you needed to sleep.”
“Sorry,” I yawned, slumped against the window in the passenger seat.
“No, you’re not. You don’t know how to be sorry. You wouldn’t know sorry if it knocked you over.” This was a standard response. Being apologetic was never my strong suit and it never failed to piss off my mother. “I don’t care how tired you are, you’re still going to soccer. Nope! Shut up. Don’t even try to argue. You’re going to your soccer game and you’re gonna play good.”
I fell asleep in the car. I fell asleep on the toilet. My mother yelled at me about losing my soccer socks. I couldn’t find my jersey. I sat down at the table to shove a banana in my mouth when my mother thrust her coffee cup in front of my face.
“Here,” she instructed, “this is coffee. Drink it, it’ll wake you up.” I took a sip.
“OW.”
“Be careful, it’s hot. Take another sip.”
“Ugh, gross, no — ”
“Isn’t it refreshing? It wakes you up.”
“That was disgusting — ”
“Come on, you’re gonna be late.”
I always wondered if my mom did that out of spite. She must have known I wouldn’t like it. I could definitely imagine her smirking from the sidelines as I exhaustedly ran up and down field.
Fast forward 6 years; I’m 18 and living in Minneapolis. I’m running around the West Bank campus with reckless abandon and no concept of how to budget my quickly dwindling bank account. My friend brings me to this hipster coffee shop two blocks away from our dorm. At her insistence, I get normal, plain coffee with nothing else in it. Up until this point, my interactions with “coffee” had been Starbucks drinks; chai lattes, green tea lattes, frappechinos, etc. I refused to believe I liked real coffee; I had been scarred by my experiences at 12 and refused to look back.
Until I was sitting in Mapps coffee shop with a steaming mug in front of me. I took a sip…
…and it took me a second, but I decided I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much that I immediately bought a bag and drank ALL of it in a matter of two weeks.
My mother had bought me a tiny coffee maker when I moved to Minneapolis.
“Mom, I don’t like coffee.”
“You’ll like it, don’t worry — ”
“Mom!”
“Just listen to me, it’ll come in handy.”
I’m not sure what the standard timeframe is to become addicted to caffeine, but I think it took me about 48 hours. I drank a thermos every morning. I drank another thermos at lunch. I usually bought some kind of candy latte drink in the evening and on the weekends that’d be followed by a cup at night. Coffee all day, coffee all night, I needed it bad and I needed it always.
In short, I completely lost my mind.
When I remember this time in my life, I sometimes wonder if coffee was my actual first love as opposed to my weird high school boyfriend. I couldn’t get enough of my new obsession…and if sort of ruined my life.
Actually, there are probably more parallels between my coffee addiction and my weird high school boyfriend than I’d like to admit.
Huh.
Anyway, it became apparent after sleepless nights and twitchy acting classes that the coffee wasn’t going over very well. So I cut back on my evening drinking, which helped, but did nothing to fix the dilapidating headache I’d get if I tried to skip a day. On spring break, I went camping. We were in rural Wisconsin and I was with an exorbitant amount of people (probably close to 16 college kids) none of whom seemed bothered by the complete lack of coffee.
I lasted about a day and a half.
This journey with coffee addiction lasted about 9 months total. The summer after my freshman year I painfully and slowly broke my dependance, mostly out of boredom. I didn’t have a job. The boy I liked didn’t like me back. I was alone. I didn’t have a car.
So I decided to quit caffeine. And once I did, I couldn’t drink the stuff for the next couple of months. It wasn’t until junior year that I established a relatively normal relationship with caffeine that wasn’t solely based on dependence and pain.
Alright. Fast forward to now or, more specifically, this morning. I get to work at 7:30am. I check my email. I check my voicemail. And then I take my tiny, cup-sized French press and make my coffee.
That is the reason I wrote this entire piece; it was on this cold, lonely morning I stared into my morning coffee. I felt the steam drift up and warm my half asleep face. I poured honey into its dark depths and I sipped my first sip.
Its warmth spread throughout my veins and the rich sweetness danced on my tastebuds. This moment is one of the best in my entire day. It’s a small second of bliss and relaxation, of love and complexity.
Perfection is the first sip of coffee in the morning.
It’s a small thing. A tiny thing that I sadly don’t think about for very long. But it’s moments like that that get me through my day and through my life. Coffee brings me life. It’s a reminder of all the small, perfect things, which is greatly needed when I spend a majority of my day doing things I’m not happy doing.
I think this is something a lot of other people can identify with. They’re working a job that isn’t as fulfilling as they need it to be and they’re not sure what to do about it.
That’s where I am right now and today I realized that coffee is one way I find strength. So even though I’ve had my ups and downs with coffee — those headaches will never be forgotten — right now it’s my best friend.
Thank you.
