But First, Coffee

My eyes felt heavy, but I didn’t let them rest after the too-much they had stayed open for, and the much-more they were waiting for to happen. I blinked very fast, too. In case you turned to look my way and find me mid-blink, then you might have thought my eyes are resting so my heart must have settled. You might have thought that the colossal anger subsided. I didn’t want you to think I calmed down.

Although I did momentarily acknowledge that my eyes were, in fact, tired. So maybe it was a physical sign that I was mentally calmer. Still, I shifted my folded legs to the opposite direction on the couch, the direction that pointed more to defiance than to reconciliation. With this measured gesture, I pushed the pathetic lack of pride found in calmness off of my lap onto the floor.

What I wanted you to think I felt and what I actually felt interspersed. I didn’t want to take the available moment to discern where one started and where the other ended. Before my eyes, I imagined fuchsia and navy blue to make a stark purplish indigo. I fixated my gaze on that incredible sultry color until my head hurt. I told myself it’s the only color the current colors of our mood can make. 

My chest felt clogged up from the fats of last night’s grilled lamb. 

Or maybe it felt this way because when you gave me the only two options to either fight or take flight, all the blood from my heart after dinner went to my sympathetic nervous system, abandoning my gut. Maybe I felt jittery because the bile salts stored in my gallbladder, coating the stubborn lipids in my liver, refused to dissolve them – to punish me for being so angry, so tired, so frustrated.

When you still didn’t look my way, I slammed a floral cushion against the green leather couch, imagining that I was crushing the yellow petal on its corner with an open palm, burying it beneath a field of grass that I knew to be greener on the other side.

The time passed for the light of dawn to break, but it was still dark. I got up to light a candle, but only because I would be at an angle where I could sneak a peek at you. You wiggled your toes, and I took it as a cue to lift my eyes to your face. I did it in the wrong time. I did it right when the flame of the lighter touched the wicker and the room kindled as if only to record evidence and make history.

Because of the wrong time I chose to look up, which was right at the moment the wicker flickered in response to the flame’s touch, you caught me catch your eyes before yours locked mine in. You exhaled with relief that I gave in first.

I could have sworn your nose grew longer and more masculine at the tiny deed of submissiveness that I gifted you. A gift, wrapped up for the futures by women in the pasts and the presents. Wonderful futures. Horrible futures. Wonderful-horrible magenta-blue futures, interspersing.

If I traced a line from the tip of your nose to where it was pointing up towards, it would connect to the corner of the ceiling where the paint was chipping off. The spot that cries each time it rains and leaves brown stains that you paint over. Once, even, with the wrong-colored paint. We had to wait for it to rain again until you fixed it with the right shade of cream that colors all of our walls like a recurrent dream.

I moved my eyes from your nose down to your mouth. I saw a small and rigid – wide and warm – smile. The oxymoron of you is why you love me, and why I love you back.

I didn’t smile in response. Instead I asked, “Is it because I looked at you first that you think I’m sorry?”

You said, “No, not at all. It’s because you lit the candle.”

Oh, I thought to myself, I forgot that candles are romantic. Then I asked you this dumb universal question, “What do you want from me? Why do you do this to me?”

You opened your mouth, my heart skipped a beat, but then you closed it to say nothing, so I prompted my heart to sink again. You looked down to your hands and furrowed your brow. I could almost slit a coin in the line between your eyebrows. You found dirt in the nail beneath your ring finger, and you obsessively started to pick on it. You looked satisfied when the dirt was cleaned.

Then you finally looked up with glassy eyes that rarely cried. With pupils that just flamed with an attractive rage that doesn’t melt, or a misunderstood determination mistaken for rage.

You pursed your lips that rarely expressed, that glowered in the silence that won me the very first day we met. A silence that still absorbs my noise like a sponge plunged in a bowl of water and detergent. Your silence: which allows me to create answers to my liking, and feed them to you with my own hands until they taste to you like promises of home.

That magnificent watery look of yours is when time froze to soften my heart…

It brought me back to our fifth date when I didn’t wait for you to kiss me first for a change, when I decided to take the lead. You were smiling at something you said and to which you weren’t expecting a response. You were caught so off-guard when I leaned over, that you didn’t close your smile to kiss me back.

I remembered how I attached my lips against your smile hoping that when your lips closed to kiss me, they would close in on me entirely. But you kept them open in a smile and so I kissed your teeth. I remembered how I then smiled against your teeth and laughed into your mouth. Inhaling you in. Exhaling you out. Red inhales and yellow exhales interspersing into an orange sky that domed around us.

“What do you want of me for us to stop fighting?” I asked you as I brushed that memory away and came back to the present mood.

“I want coffee, for now”, you responded, without an answer.

I should have cried. I should have detonated like a bomb from your indifference. But you were different. And you loved me. You loved me just as much as coffee, “for now”, and universes more. I knew that but I didn’t know how I knew it since you said so little for me to know.

Maybe it was because you looked straight into my eyes when you said you wanted coffee. Maybe because you were endearing in the way you so honestly just wanted coffee. Maybe because I want to just give and give and give you the wrong things that the thought of giving you coffee was a good way to feel peace in offering you something you want, for now. 

Maybe because I knew what you wanted from me. And I knew that you couldn’t say it because it doesn’t stem out from my old roots, it plants new roots in me. It is something I find, not something I have. And even when I find it, it’s not something I can give. Maybe wanting little things isn’t so bad. And not wanting big things is what’s good.

You wanted good stinky cheese, like Gruyere, on bread that’s hard and crusty on the outside and fluffy on the inside. You wanted to run your tongue on the dust of flour on your lips, then smack them together and say: “Now that’s bread!”

You wanted to raise a cold, cold crystal glass of Riesling and clink it against your fathers’ to make a sound that belonged to happier days.

You wanted to toast to the nothing that exploded after the big bang of his passing, and mean it when you are able to finally say: If it doesn’t break you, it makes you. You wanted to know whether you still didn’t say it because you couldn’t? Or you wouldn’t?

You wanted the joy of swirling red Rioja, or Burgundy or Barbera d’Asti, or a good ol’ Merlot between your teeth, to come back. You wanted to remember how to hold the fullness in your mouth for a while, before you gulp it down so fast to forget. To fix your Tom Ford cocktail jacket, preferably a brand new one, as you say: this wine tastes strongly of ripe crushed blackberries! To really, REALLY, take pride in the soil the berry-like grapes were cultivated in.

You wanted good butter. The old traditional brand that your grandmother served, not the grass-fed one that I tell you is healthier. You wanted me to be made just like that conventional good butter, to be able to melt in heat and spread thin on a toast rather than break it to crumbs. Mmmmm, good butter. That’s the best feeling, for now, the processed stuff – is what you wanted to say. 

And you know what? I also wanted to be your butter – especially when you looked at me that way in need for nothing but coffee – I wanted nothing but to be spread thin like that, and serve your coffee to you however way you wanted it that dark morning, piping hot or ice cold.

I didn’t want answers. There were no answers. There was just coffee, wine, butter, maybe sunny side up eggs, and mulberry jam without seeds, the ones they make in Chamonix. These are my answers: tangible answers that taste so good and feel even better.

“What? Did you say something?” I looked up and asked you one last question, perhaps still stupidly hopeful, before getting up to get coffee.

You smoothed your hair with the palms of both hands, and when you lowered your arms, you rubbed only one hand against your shirt, resting it on the area beneath which the mysterious rhythm of your heart beat. With the other palm, you gestured for me to come to you.

“I said, let’s take it one step at a time”, you responded with one arm reaching out for me.

I loved you so much then. I hugged the blanket of your coldness, its fibers kept me warm. I loved your demanding palate. The way your satiety levels dimmed then sparked a few odd hours after we fought. The way your mouth watered for the present moment just as much as mine dried up in the past tense. The way you would never, ever, disappoint me by giving me answers to questions. The way you took calculated steps around me, miscalculating how slow they made your journey. 

So I said, “I know what you want. You want wine, and butter, and bread and cheese, and maybe a good egg sandwich with ketchup. You want to powder ride in deep snow. You want to wakeboard without a board. You want to swim so far and you want to feel great when you worry me. You want to jump off of waterfalls with your arms wide open, like Jesus. You want to build a home and to make art and you want to have so much time to —”

“That, all – yes. But first, coffee!” You interrupted me with a smile.

All of a sudden, I was sure my gallbladder started releasing the bile salts to dissolve the stubborn lipids of my anger. I let my heavy eyelids close like a velvet curtain closing on a villain’s soliloquy, to the audience’s great relief. My autonomic nervous system allowed my heart to tend to its other organs in need of its love. I felt healthy again from the nothing that you said. A round of applause sounded from nowhere.

I de-focused, re-focused, just-focused on all the bread and butter in your eyes, all the coffee in your heart, all the wine in your mouth, all the simple, dangerous, contrasting things that make your eyes look glassy and your pupils dilate.

I hugged you from afar because of all the silences you gifted me, all the spacious silences of your watery red love that quench my thirst for answers. They accumulated to take over my white noise. White-red, new colors of us – interspersing to make a pink promise of today’s future, and all the coffee it can serve, for now.

_{by Beisan A. Alshafei}

_{Written on around September, 2020}