You know how some people say "Life would be over without my [significant other]," or "I've given up my old ways, I now devote myself to my [children, job, volunteer work]"? I feel the same way, but for coffee: my Arabic lover, my innocent little Colombian baby, that which I would give my all to have for only 12 ounces.
When I was brought to coffee by a fate fair and true, I was only a freshman at a large research university in Western New York, adrift on a sea of opportunity in a vessel of boundless enthusiasm. I could barely contain my friends, frivolities and academic furor within what seemed to be the shortest daylight hours in the country, and the nights lasted months under a student's lamp or a monitor's warm glow. Soon, I would find one who could extend my days twice over the sun's rise and fall, and guide me gently again to my slumber, only after I had accomplished a good third of what I needed to.
I cannot say what whim of the gods brought me to my saccharine soul mate, nor can I savor again its first scalding kiss upon my tongue. I had played at love before with beverages of similar constitution, to be sure, but in coffee's warm embrace I had found a fresh-ground spur to prick the sides of my intent, vaulting me to new heights of dependency.
Since our first encounter, I have been shown what it means to co-exist with another in symbiotic fulfillment. I meet my love out almost every night, whether it's sitting down to a late-night breakfast special at Tom's Diner or burning the midnight oil at Lockwood together. If she's nowhere to be found, I'll never be surprised to find her waiting at home, the mood struck right for a night nestled together in Flint Village.
If all that weren't enough, it is scandalous wife's-talk that I report here: she has taken to surprising me at my office, wearing little on her mocha body except a flimsy sleeve of synthetic garb.
My mother, my doctor, my closest friends all tell me it's nothing but bad love, but I say my paramour drives me to be better than I am without. I had never discovered the vast expanse between darkest night and new day's dawn until I sat up with mi amore, her whispering tales of my own ingenuity in essay composition. She stands behind me and massages my eye sockets when fitful nights conspire to render me unconscious in class. I have never packed to return to my home in Syracuse, nor made any travel decision really, without her counsel.
I have heard knaves and fools disparage my chosen one, labeling me a fool for falling reliant on so base and damaging a drug. To paraphrase Milton, the human soul lies in having willful choice of the divine and the sinful, in which I choose the sinful that feels divine. If you find yourself with nausea and trembling of the hands after a day without, I say you are truly living now, perhaps for the first time. Better to have loved and lost ...
But I digress. Paranoid men of medicine say coffee has "negative effects on blood pressure" (whatever that is), along with cigarettes. I've heard the same of Nick Tahoe's garbage plates, stress and Jim's Steakout. So give up your coffee, your smokes, your food of choice and that which makes you strong: you're going to feel quite the fool someday, lying at the hospital and dying from nothing.
Furthering evidence that HMOs exist to provide naggers with a steady income, dentists tell those under their miniature scythes that coffee rots their teeth a distinct shade of yellow. Have they never experienced love's bite, what the vulgar call a hickey?
I'm almost sure the intense, pointed headaches stem not from withdrawal but from remembrance. Suddenly, you're thrust into the world all alone, with no need for plastic stirrers and cream-sized cups, and you're confronted by your former self, the one who slept eight hours and tasted only air in their mouth. How lonely the nights spent without that artery-widening companion, how silent a space without the sounds of percolation!
Coffee has proven itself time and again my greatest love, and I would slay a thousand mongrels who would dare stand between us. Those who would decry our bond are loveless, lifeless and dull, and may God have mercy on their soul.
