three cups of coffee
as the title suggests, the third day of Christmas was easily the least eventful so far, a sure sign that things are slowly returning themselves to normal. i engaged in all my morning rituals: journaling, reading, showering, a light breakfast and two cups of half-caffeinated coffee.
since my yin had a client coming over, i exiled myself to Dunkin Donuts mid-morning, where i made the mistake of ordering a third cup of coffee. this one was black like the others, but high test rather than the weakened brew i make at home. i sat sipping it, scorching my taste buds without so much as a flinch, gnawing on a blueberry muffin that the woman behind the counter assured me was the best in the house – all in the name of a lousy coupon i had lurking 'round my wallet.
soon i felt the onset of the stimulant, zoning out in that pleasant place of hyper-focus and tunnel vision. unbeknownst to me, my yin's client had canceled and i continued working, totally oblivious to the fact that she had called and emailed telling me it was safe to come home. eventually the message was relayed by foot, and she walked into the place like some Revolutionary War messenger carried an urgent dispatch from General Lafayette:
"Qu'est-ce tu fais?"
"J'écris."
"Mais, tu peux retourner chez nous maintenant."
"D'accord."
on the short walk home i came across two French-Canadian children playing in the courtyard, perhaps made manifest by my caffeine-psychosis. "Salut!" i said to one of them. the child looked at me with a mix of embarrassment and amusement, probably provoked by my shameful accent and painful earnestness.
but this is beside the point.
the point is that i paid for this third cup of coffee for the rest of the day with a medium-grade headache that just wouldn't let me be. i tried feeding it leftover tofu and chocolaty sweets; i tried escaping to the post office and bank and library. it followed me everywhere, dogging my every step until i eventually climbed into bed with an undelivered Christmas present. i sat reading dead men's letters like a common grave robber, pulling out gems like these and wishing i could write like a 17-year old:
"... it has all the melancholy grandeur of Mother Russia, all the borscht and caviar that bubbles in the veins of the Slav, all the ethereal emptiness of that priceless possession, the Russian soul."
- [name redacted], August 1944 but how common can any grave robber be in this modern world? do graves even exist when every chosen word is made available immediately? does any mystery remain, or do we live in an era of endless information? how can we run from the fluorescent omniscience of empty knowledge in a world where all our idols have already been killed for us?
the headache did not recede.
i wrote Saylor, trying to explain these things without saying them, and what emerged was an impossibly disjointed letter of short sentences and unremarkable proportions. even at my most capable, i would be hard pressed to name the things spinning in my mind. tiny fluctuations popping in and out of existence like the quantum tunneling i had read about earlier in the day:
it helps glucose catalyze into hydrogen peroxide... allegedly
in the end it was only my yin's cabbage tempeh casserole that saved me, and the headache receded into the void from which it came sometime after dinner. we finished watching Broken Flowers from the night before, which features Bill Murray as an over the hill Lothario searching for his son:
from here, we fade to black
in the end he finds nothing, of course, and i was well-pleased by the film's lack of closure: the passing broken-down Volkswagen and its slack-jawed doofus of a passenger juxtaposed against the hip, road-wise hitchhiker we all imagine our progeny – be they words or chromosomes – to be.
thus concluded the third day of Christmas.
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