Prompt: A second cup of coffee
Throughout my years in Carrboro, NC, I could be found – at first quite frequently and then later from time to time – reading, writing and ruminating at the Open Eye Café. It’s where I had my first ever cup of coffee – believe it or not at the age of thirty! I remember well that first cup. Kara – a friend of mine to this day – expressed to me her curiosity that I spent so much time in a coffee shop and yet had never ordered anything but juice and cookies. She insisted I try some coffee, widely regarded as the finest in the area. It was impossible to refuse a free cup of coffee from a girl with dimples, and so I chugged it down as if it were chocolate milk on a summer day. Kara looked at me as if I had lost my mind, explaining to me that coffee was a beverage meant to be sipped and savored. Perhaps it was the unpleasant associations I had made between coffee and my parents’ heavy smoking throughout my childhood, but for whatever reason I had always regarded coffee drinking as a pointless, disgusting habit. I also had assumed (wrongly) that the caffeine buzz was approximately equivalent to a can of Coke or Pepsi, which to me was undetectable. Within a minute or two of downing that first cup I asked for a refill, which I also threw back in a few quick gulps. Then it happened. I began to talk, and talk, and talk, as if I had just been released from a decade in solitary confinement. Suddenly I found myself engaging with staff and patrons alike, people I had seen a hundred times before, yet with whom I had not – until now – exchanged more than the occasional furtive glance. I was beyond buzzed. I was downright high. For the next several months I used coffee like most people use recreational drugs, as a way to ring in the weekend or as a social lubricant. It took about a year for me to become an everyday drinker, then about another year to move from one cup to two a day. Although I no longer get quite the thrill I used to get from my two cups of Joe, I still enjoy my coffee thoroughly, even reverentially at times. And I can still be found from time to time in a local coffee shop. Presently I’m camped out at Milagro in Las Cruces, NM. It’s becoming my new Open Eye. More than ten years have passed since Kara got me hooked on the magic bean. She eventually married an affable chap named Andy, and they just had a baby. Robert Harman – a.k.a. The King of Carrboro, The Colonel, The Mayor of Open Eye – was hit by a car and killed this summer, right after I moved to NM. It’s weird how time does what it does. It’s strange how this place – Milagro – is so familiar, so much like the Open Eye. The cute baristas. The hipsters hiding behind books and laptops. I’m still here, reading the same books, thinking the same thoughts, drifting down the same stream. I’m wearing a beard these days, flecks of gray betraying the baby face underneath. My cup is empty. The first refill is free.