# Gestures The old man sat by the window, his hands folded in his lap. Outside, the street moved with its ordinary traffic—vendors calling out prices, children chasing each other between parked cars, the slow shuffle of people going about their business. He watched it all without seeing, his eyes fixed on something beyond the glass. His daughter had left that morning. She'd kissed his forehead—a hurried thing, performed out of duty rather than affection—and promised to return on Sunday. It was only Tuesday. Five days stretched ahead like an ocean he had to cross alone. He raised his hand and looked at it. The fingers were spotted with age, the knuckles swollen. Strange how these hands had once been quick, capable of shaping clay, of holding a child steady on a bicycle, of reaching across a table to touch his wife's face in the dark. Now they trembled slightly when he tried to hold a cup of tea. His wife had been gone for three years. Sometimes he forgot this fact until it struck him fresh each morning—the empty side of the bed, the single plate on the table, the silence that had become his constant companion. His daughter called this "adjustment." She meant well. She brought him vegetables and rice, helped him bathe, reminded him to take his medicines. But her eyes, when she thought he wasn't watching, held something like impatience. The clock on the wall ticked. Two in the afternoon. The light fell across the room in slabs, illuminating dust particles that drifted without direction or purpose. He watched them—these tiny fragments suspended in air—and felt a kinship with them. His grandson had visited last month. The boy was eight, tall for his age, with his mother's serious mouth. They had sat in the same room for an hour, the child perched on a stool, the old man in his chair, and neither had known what to say. Finally, the boy had asked if he could watch television. The old man had nodded. After the boy left, he'd found a drawing tucked behind the cushion of the sofa—a stick figure with a large circle for a head, standing beside another, taller figure. Both were smiling. He'd kept it in his pocket for days, taking it out to study it like a man deciphering a code. The afternoon wore on. He thought about lunch but felt no hunger. He thought about his wife. Not the woman she'd become at the end—thin, fevered, afraid—but the girl she'd been when they first met. She'd been carrying a basket of guavas at the market, and one had fallen at his feet. He'd picked it up, and she'd laughed at his clumsiness in handing it back. That laugh. He could still hear it, though it had been buried beneath decades now. He rose slowly, gripping the armrest, and made his way to the small table in the corner where photographs were arranged. There was his wedding picture—both of them impossibly young, impossibly hopeful. There was his daughter as a child, riding on his shoulders. There was his wife in the garden, shielding her eyes from the sun. He touched the glass over her face, his finger leaving a mark. For a moment, he tried to smile the way she was smiling in the photograph. His face felt stiff, unused to the gesture. In the kitchen, he prepared tea. His hands shook as he measured the tea leaves, and some scattered across the counter. He left them there. The water boiled. He poured it over the leaves and waited, watching the brown color deepen. While waiting, he gestured to the empty chair across from him—inviting her, as he did every afternoon, to sit. The tea grew cold. When the sun began to set, he moved back to his chair by the window. The street below was changing—the harsh light of day giving way to the softer glow of evening. Shopkeepers were pulling down their shutters. Families were heading home. The world was consolidating itself, preparing for night. He thought about his daughter, what she was doing at this moment. Perhaps she was cooking dinner. Perhaps she was helping her son with his studies. Perhaps she was thinking of him at all. He raised his hand slowly and waved at the empty room—not quite a gesture of greeting, not quite one of goodbye. Something in between. Something that acknowledged the presence of absence, the weight of memory, the strange persistence of love after all other things have fallen away. Outside, the street lights flickered on. Inside, the old man sat with his hands folded once more, waiting for the night to settle fully, waiting for sleep, waiting for the small mercy of tomorrow's forgetting, which never came.

# 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.