Coffeeshop chronicles
would you like cream with that ?
Enter, scene: This morning. Me: foggy & barely awake in my striped English grandad pajamas. A loud clang rang out from the other room—which, as any parent of young children knows, is never a promising sound. I abandoned a sink full of freshly rinsed raspberries to find my 1.5-year-old in the living room, mid-gulp, casually knocking back my warm, creamy coffee from his miniature table like a grown man with somewhere to be. He turns to look at me, gloriously goofy gap-toothed baby grin exploding across his tiny face. “Mmmm Caca” (our household term for coffee/alcohol/any off limits beverage), he squealed, erupting into ecstatic laughter. Another one bites the dust.
Coffee and I have, at best, a complicated relationship. Well, rather, caffeine and I. Deny it as I may, I simply was not born with the genetic makeup for it. The jolt sends my anxious nervous system into a tailspin, and yet I have no interest in a life without the ritual. I love the romance of it all. The smell at dawn. The ceremony of pouring a cup (I take mine piping hot with a splash of raw cream) and slipping back into bed. The built-in excuse to step away when staring down a blank page, an untouched guitar, or an inbox that feels more than vaguely hostile, as they tend to so often these days. “Just grabbing a quick coffee” has rescued me more times than I care to admit.
In my twenties, those moments belonged to cigarettes, mainly. So. Many. Cigarettes. Good lord, how I miss smoking. Even years on. Funny enough, during both my pregnancies, I never missed the wine, didn’t daydream of martinis or even an epic Omakase. It was the waft of a lit Marlboro or American Spirit that could drag me directly to the edge of temptation. Thats nostalgia for you. I finally quit at 29, alongside my best girlfriend, when consequences begun to feel less like a suggestion and more like a certainty. When that time came, the most surprising thing wasn’t the absence of nicotine, but the sudden abundance of free time. These habits aren’t just indulgences; they’re infrastructure. They give shape to a day. Without them, I felt like I was left…lingering a bit.
