Coffee

It’s spring. It's a perfect evening to sulk in your temperature-controlled room (which reeks of steel), while the rest of the world devours the night and loses itself in spiralling revelry devoid of corrosive self-pity. Inside, the electric-white tube light falls unforgiving and unromantic on my skin and casts translucent shadows on the yellowing wall. The velvet-redblack atmosphere of the night cannot creep underneath these snappy, irritated doors of misanthropy and general dislike of the world-at-large. These doors lock out old memories. They dam the flow of caustic strychnine long bottled up. They are necessary.

The days are rolling into each other. They are monochromatic streams melting into a larger river of Time, indistinguishable from each other; black and white mingling and flowing together into a grey raindrop-dappled hazy window in my bedroom looking out into the smoky garden outside, where you and I used to drink of my words and your voice. Surely this tainted window is a worm hole through the memory-time fabric–I swear that I can just make out the passionate tingling of your sweat-scent drifting on the December wind–or are those the rosy daffodils which infect the chill so, and arouse my skin; were you forever without a smell of your own, my love? Were those the birds we heard singing so long ago, and was the poetry all borrowed?

The past is silent. This is spring, and many rains have passed since that poisonous dawn, when you declared to your morning coffee that you felt like a ‘hamster on an infinite treadmill’. I wonder if you remember your coffee – I recall mine perfectly. My cup was painted over with red gambolling horses, and the liquid inside was a muddy brown, which became steadily lighter. The cup left circular stains on the book of rhyme we'd read the night before, as I lifted it up and heard you agitatedly gesture over the rim. It had been a beautiful day outside. The birds had just begun talking to the pinkish clouds of love and other taffy-coloured things, and the brook outside our summer cottage had been chuckling softly all night, revivified by the recent rains. I remember thinking that the day would never end.

Sometimes I think a part of it never did. In the wake of the death of Us, the world used to buck under my feet, the ground used to try to throw me off. Our love had supplanted my happiness, become it. It was some time before I could feel alive again.

But that's a long time ago. Today has been beautiful too. The evening is making love to the night, the clouds are bursting at their silver linings, and dewy fruits are being born out of the virgin wedlock of God and Nature. The Emperor of the World is wearing New Clothes. I am the only one stuck in the aged fabric. I am the only one who still wears old clothes.

I wonder where you are, now. I wonder if you ever escaped your treadmill. I wonder if you're happy.

I hope. I hope you're not. I hope you met someone who painted your life with a hundred shades of spring; with whom you carved out a happy little Shelf in the assembly belt of life, who made you happy when you saw him over the rim of your morning coffee–and he have left you for another Shelf while you slipped off the Assembly Belt. I hope then that you slowly gather the inner beauty to make yourself convex and start living again. I hope, that one day you realize–as I knew–that all one requires to make the pedestrian, melancholic cycle of day-and-night livable is someone with whom you can trace constellations of freckles.

...

… And may this day be a frozen winter day. I still haven't fully forgiven you.