They met, as have so many couples throughout history, over a cup of coffee. He had never had coffee before, but it seemed to be the thing to do, to ask this woman he was drawn to and wanted to spend more time with if she wanted to get a cup of coffee after a Saturday morning group run.
So perhaps it is not strictly accurate to say they first met over a cup of coffee. They had, of course, met earlier in their running group, but sharing a cup of coffee was the first time they met as two people, outside of the comfortable bonhomie of a larger group full of banter that can easily be passed off as just banter, even though the truth was that, more and more, he found himself attuned only to the things she said, and noticed (hoped) that her eyes seemed to sparkle a little more than usual whenever he broke through his natural shyness and ventured to speak himself.
She said yes, of course — otherwise there would be no story, just another disappointment in his life which had its share of disappointments, one less heartbreak in her life which had its share of heartbreak.
He had never really fallen in love before, at least not in the same way. But between the excitement of being, finally, the center of each others’ attention, and the effects of the thousand-plus chemical compounds in the hot, black, bitter liquid they shared, his tongue, usually guarded, began telling things he had never told to anyone, his tightly-held inner life unexpectedly uncoiling and relaxing before her.
Coffee is often described as the drink of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; the food writer Michael Pollan wrote a whole audio book about how its most well-known active ingredient, caffeine, “has won and lost wars, changed politics, and dominated economies.” In the work of Pollan and other historians, coffee is often presented in contrast to alcohol, by far Europe’s favorite beverage before coffee was introduced from the Ottoman Empire.
In this telling, coffee is the beverage of the clear-headed and industrious. But no, coffee is the beverage of the ecstatic, of the Sufi mystics who first perfected it as a beverage so they could stay up all night, dancing and praying and filling their minds and bodies and hearts with the infinite and transcendent.
When she stayed with him, she would make coffee for him in the morning. Don’t get the wrong idea: she was otherwise completely uninterested in domesticity, and when they shared home-cooked meals, he did all the cooking. But in the mornings, she would carefully pour boiling water over the paper filter full of dark grounds as it sat in the small plastic filter-holder that was his only means of making the beverage, seeing as how he was too cheap and protective of his limited counter space to purchase a proper coffee maker.
Having been introduced to it much later in life than most of us, and as a source of pleasure rather than as a spur to productivity, coffee always retained for him an aura of magic, even as he became habituated to the hit of caffeine to his system. He drank it black, and hot, and unsweetened, the better to savor the bitter taste.
He drank coffee when he was with her, of course, but also when he was not. Even grabbing a substandard cup at a convenience store brought the memory of the last time he was with her, and an intimation of the next time he would see her, to his lips.
It came to an end, of course, as all things do. And he gave up coffee, which made him irritable and tired for a few weeks, but irritable and tired was a welcome distraction from his broken heart.
He told his friends it was for his health, but the truth is, he gave up coffee because it reminded him too much of her, of the times they spent together, of the very aura, the irreplaceable, unreproducible specificity and singularity, of that period of his life. Over the years most of the places they had spent time together lost that aura. Or, perhaps more accurately, the memories of being with her in those places were replaced, or at least mostly drowned out, by new memories of those places, new auras. But coffee, its smell and its taste and its invitation to the ecstasy of possibility, would always remind him of that piece of his heart, that piece of him, that would forever be tied to her, that would forever long for just one more cup.
Today is National Coffee Day in the U.S. and Canada, and, while my relationship with coffee has had a few twists and turns over the years, it’s not a very interesting tale to tell. So instead I just made up a story. I also made a playlist:
I really enjoyed reading this account in The Guardian of an afternoon spent drinking one of my other favorite beverages with Paul Heaton, the lead singer of the Housemartins in the 80s and The Beautiful South in the 90s.
Last Wednesday was the anniversary of what I guess you might call one of the great rock-and-roll deaths, when Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham choked on his own vomit after drinking something like 40 shots of vodka (not one of my favorite beverages). To, uh, celebrate the occasion, I gussied up an old post about Led Zeppelin, the electric guitar, violence, and melancholy with some video embeds and so forth. If you weren’t a subscriber when I published it in 2022 on a more primitive platform (or didn’t read it, or simply want to reread it or watch the videos), check it out here:
I love this little short fiction story. Thanks.