Instantacity

I adore coffee. I love the smell of it, the taste of it; the whole experience. I love the oily sheen of coffee beans and the brown froth that forms on the top of an espresso. It’s an elegant drink and, when made correctly, one of the most beautiful things you can experience.

It can give you the endurance to write a paper, the fortitude to break off a relationship and the solace to begin an idea. It’s a reason in itself to stay in touch with people. It is one of the most unifying things in the world and also one of the most derisive.

Coffee is personal. A relationship that grows and intensifies. It can begin poorly with bad experiences. Coffee is a cheap whore or an elegant princess, depending on how you treat her. She can be a bland encounter or an intoxicating endeavor. She’s a she because I’m a he who likes shes but coffee can be so much more. It is personal.

She can be pressed, squeezed, dripped, percolated – dressed in lavish costumes of crème and chocolate, while accessorized with sugar. People adore her; artists try to recreate her in chocolate, cakes, and martinis. She is an entity that is not necessary, but after losing her one loses vibrancy.

Coffee is unfair. Through rubbing the coarse grounds in your fingers you can feel the dirt and grit that goes into getting coffee to your cup. Like sacrificial lambs, farmers are growing the crop without reward, a great injustice for the ones bring us this ambrosia. They are the great chiefs that distance permits us to forget rather to respect. A cruel injustice that adds to the bitterness of each sip.

But we are stuck in this never-ending cycle. Coffee is a leech, we love it but at the same time it destroys us. Our benefit comes at someone else’s cost, and coffee reminds us of this with its affect on our system. Only the inexperienced succumb to the effect of the jitters, but everyone falls victim to the effect on the bowels. Coffee’s revenge.

Through all of this, I still court her. She is a mistress I try to master, but am always at a loss. Coffee is wild and free, and no one can bridle her in her truist essence.

So when I come to a country that’s only coffee is INSTANT, a part of me is burnt. Instant coffee is only a shadow. You can’t think with a cup of instant coffee. It’s only purpose is to keep the reader busy. But even though it poses and I look upon it with such disdain, I can’t escape it because it retains a bit of its essence. Instant and Decaf are the bastard children of coffee, corrupted through human meddling. It’s never appreciated, and I hate myself a little bit for drinking such a brutish form, but it reminds me of the real being. Even this vile connection is clung to vehemently; for it is the only connection I have with my elusive lady.

The salt in this wound is this: while cheap coffee can be dressed up with milk and sugar, here there is no real milk. An added insult to my humiliation.