Day 6: Second person coffee.

Well, I think that catching up is out of reach for me at this point, so I'm just going to pick back up at day six and try to stay on track from there.

I'm kind of digging how this turned out, despite the completely stupid subject  matter and my usual distaste for second person. I think it seems Miranda July-esque, which is all I could hope for, really. Btw, Bryan, this is what I want for Christmas. Signed.

Who knew that I had such a fraught lifelong relationship with coffee?

Um, I don't know why I started editorializing each of these writing challenge posts. It's like when kids start essays with "I'm going to write about..." Stopping that now.

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A Drinking Problem

You are five years old and your mother gives it to you once in a while with a lot of milk and sugar, like after family dinners on Sundays. You drink it happily and the adults around you find this amusing and cute. You say you want more of it. It makes you feel hungry and incomplete.

You are eight years old, sitting in the kitchen with your mother and your grandmother.Your mother is drinking it. Your grandmother does not drink it, you realize. You are beginning to sense a new dichotomy: those who drink it, and those who drink diet coke.

You are ten years old and it is Saturday. Your parents are busy all day with household chores. You want to show them that you aren't lazy like they think you are. Actually, you want to show them that you can learn to be less lazy. You notice that they drink it all day, non-stop. You make a big deal of bringing fresh mugs of it to them, wherever they are working. On one trip up the stairs with a fresh cup, the mug is way too full, so you instinctively lean in to sip the excess off the top. You scald your lips. You are shocked by how hot it is. You ask your parents how they can stand it. They hypothesize that, with time, the nerves in your mouth wear off.

You are fifteen years old and trying to do too much. It's important that you keep busy, but you're not sure why. You have no time and you are miserable, but you can't stop anything. You start drinking it in earnest, every morning before school. Sometimes you also drink it at night to stay awake so you can study and finish homework assignments. You already need it. You are only fifteen.

You are seventeen years old and you are training for a triathlon. You're not sure why. Your parents ask you not to, but you insist that it's important to you and that you must do it, even though you only have a Huffy mountain bike. It is summer. Your family is going on a day trip to a Mennonite cheese shop, so you wake up early for a six mile training run. Afterwards, you make a cup of it with powdered creamer, and, for some reason, it's the best cup of it you've ever had. Later, you learn that powdered creamer contains trans fats, so you never use it again.

You are eighteen years old and you buy a coffee maker for your dorm room. It is red. You can't make it taste as good as your mother can. You can't get the water to grounds ratio right. You wonder if you will ever enjoy the coffee of your childhood again. You drink the cold gray coffee from the cafeteria sometimes, instead. Also, you sometimes buy if from the campus convenience store. It comes in a plain white styrofoam cup. You are terrified of the freshman fifteen. You drink coffee instead of eating food. You work out too much. You sweat coffee instead of water. You stay up all night and the skin on your face feels raw.

You are nineteen years old, and you go on a date with a kid you've had a crush on for a while. You drink a lot of it and talk too much and too fast about yourself. You realize that you don't actually like the kid. You only like his glasses.

You are 21 years old and it is finals week. You have to write six essays in six days. You feel so sick and anxious that it begins to hurt your stomach, so you start drinking plain lattes instead. This is a very bad decision, financially, but you get As on all your papers.

You are 21 years old and you are in Mexico. They don't make it here the way they make it at home, so you have to settle for cafe americanos. You don't really like the way those taste, but you have to drink them anyway. You realize that you don't just depend on it to stay awake. You also depend on it to feel just normal and okay.

You are 22 years old and you are unemployed. You get up every morning and make a cup of it with your roommate's expensive Keurig. Then you drink it with toast while watching Bravo on your roommate's expensive plasma screen TV.

You are 22 years old and you are in Italy. Some days, you get it from a little vending machine. It comes in a paper cup. One day, you forget to get it (or are unable to get; you can't quite remember), and then you go for a long bike ride through vineyards and apple orchards. You turn off the main path to look at something. When you turn back on, you don't look both ways, and you crash into an elderly cyclist. He falls from his bike and curses you in Italian. You feel terrible and cry and cry. You blame everything on the fact that you went without it for one morning.

You are 23 years old and you read an article about a study whose results suggest that regular coffee consumption helps women fight depression. You think about your own habits and you think about your mother's habits. You think the article sounds true. You think about how your mother drank it when you were in utero. You think about how maybe you've been addicted to it literally for forever.