Gestures

# Often Often, you don’t really think about the gestures you make—often mechanical, often born simply from the need not to interrupt the day, not to break its rhythm, not to let your thoughts wander to places where they might begin to laugh, to question, to unravel you, to alter, in fact, the very taste that coffee might have had that morning. Mechanically you move from room to room, building your future one step at a time. Small, frail, fragile gestures that complete everything. These people know nothing, yet they want everything; they don’t understand reality, yet they pretend to know it and claim, moreover, that it belongs to them. Or at least that’s what they say. You smile, unguarded, in the solitude of your one, two, three, or four-room apartment. Windows sealed shut. Outside, always in the morning, the sound of a drill, the whine of a saw, the chaos of a construction site. You change your shirt, you change your TV channel, you change your cup simply because you can’t find the one you drank from yesterday. How much flavor can coffee really hold? And all of them promise you the bittersweet notes of dark chocolate, oranges, flowers, the earth’s core, the hot and rolling tastes of wind. I remind you of all the places you’ll probably never visit—not because it’s impossible, but because everything in your world is mechanical. Everything. Besides, too much coffee only brings on the stomach pain that comes when your belly is twisted in knots, and anyway it matters less than how hard it’s been roasted: light, more burnt, very burnt. Can you smell it? A journey never begins where you think it truly begins—not the way a first sentence might have launched an entire novel, but not here, where everything is far too mechanical, far too rigid. You don’t want to use metaphors because people try to decode them, and they do it badly. These are just attempts, like so many others. Some have spent their whole lives blaming each other. They just kept drinking coffee or drinking. But I still think you need a good reason for that. Coffee—you hold onto it when you don’t hold onto her. The mechanical mornings are becoming a little more vivid. There’s a strip of sunrise creeping in, you can make out what it is, waking early when the whole human breath is asleep. Or at least half the world’s population. You blame less in the hope that others will do the same. It never works that way. And yet you have only one purpose. The direction doesn’t matter, the object of your concrete passion doesn’t matter—forgotten, rediscovered, invoked again. You count on the scraps of your own universe, small, skeptical, worn. You count when you get the courage to write again, drink bitter and yet perfect coffee. For the bitter taste of coffee is bitter only for the unknowing. If you end up drinking it carefully, with the gratitude of being able to prepare it, of being able to enjoy it, then you fall prey to it forever. You let her make you feel better, let her bring you back to life. To save you. Coffee can have many tastes, have you ever tried to drink coffee when you are very nervous? We might as well drink directly from the tap in those moments, the effect would be the same. The taste of courage we’re looking for isn’t there. This year I saw all kinds of shapes and faces, and smiled at them without believing in them, grateful for some of the most beautiful drawings that formed there, on those mornings when you could start your day with a surprising dose of creativity simply by chance. But it’s not, is it? It’s not chance that flavours you to feel whenever you imagine, since the evening, that you’ll have it in front of your eyes again in the morning. It’s not random, it’s not random desire. Mornings aren’t mechanical when you dare too little, when you take the tiny step toward reawakening everything that’s been numb, clenched, chilled. No, even these words are not random, and many of the things that seem incomprehensible are, in fact, for lack of patience. What does coffee look like that gives you patience, confidence, non-mechanical morning? I tried to buy, at a significant discount, a special packet of coffee, suitable for espresso machine, light-medium roasted, delicate, aromatic, prepared as if for me, but not with the discount that had been offered to me. I left it there, in the virtual basket, to wait as mechanically as possible, as long as I make a real coffee, with delicious restaurant taste. And I left a few more questions, expectations, troubles, little glimpses of dreams, hopes, in various doses. And fortunately, if the coffee is good enough, and I can wait just 24 hours, tomorrow, I can get myself back. Tomorrow morning.