In the pursuit of good coffee

Credit: Erin Deborah

By Erin Deborah

So many of my waking hours are spent contemplating my next coffee. It has become an obsession, an addiction. I cannot quite put my finger on what it is I so desperately need, crave, on an almost constant basis. Sure, it is the oh-so-delicious caffeine that pumps blood faster, harder, stronger. No surprise so many of us are slaves to its control. We need to be powered; we need energy to get through the increasingly demanding pace of the lives we live. 

But it is so much more than that. I seek the rush of adrenaline, the fuel that glides ceaselessly through my veins, powering my every decision. The gorgeous silence, the calm, that overtakes me when I sip quietly, headphones pounding music into my ears. The safe comfort over a warm mug, shared with an acquaintance, a lover, a friend. This is what drives me.

Cut to me, writing on my day off as I always do, staring out of the window with a faithful cup of coffee in hand. As my hand glides over the page, words pouring out of me in the way only writers (or the tortured) understand, I pause, looking back at the words I just wrote. This, this act of silent rebellion, is something I rarely do when writing my private thoughts on paper. Yet this is different. This cup of coffee, this line I have written, oh so unconsciously, has sparked something in me. An idea. More than that. An aesthetic. A focus. An elusive passion. 

And thus, Coffee and Unlit Cigarettes was born. That sentence I so brazenly scribbled out in the messy hand I reserve only for my personal thoughts captured so perfectly the simple yet powerful objective I have had hidden inside since forever. Coffee, that part is obvious, I guess it stands in simultaneously for the quiet, small moments of joy, and the passion, the drive, towards which we are all aiming. Unlit Cigarettes because of the danger, the darkness, the torment we face, coupled with the intangible pursuit of said passion, our inability to always grasp the happiness, the excitement, we all desire. 

In a quiet frenzy on an inconsequential Wednesday afternoon, I sat in my friend’s apartment, I spent hours in front of a screen, pen in hand, this project came to fruition. Who knows where Coffee and Unlit Cigarettes will go, perhaps nowhere, as so many beautiful and fleeting ideas often do. But in that moment, where for once what I wanted to say, what I truly needed to express, matched up with the pen moving fluidly across the page, nothing has ever been so obvious.