God Drinks It Black, Too

Legend Says It Started With A Goat,

a few restless Ethiopian goats, a 9th century herder named Kaldi, and a night where sleep refused to show up, the monks thanked him, dried the cherries, and accidentally invented the first all nighter, fast forward a thousand years and we are still worshipping the same bean, only now it arrives in gold trimmed armor, sitting on a saucer like a tiny throne, look at it, the cup in front of you does not ask to be held, it expects to be addressed.

Coffee is the only art form you can drink before you’ve decided who you are today, paint dries, sculpture stands still, but coffee moves, it steams, it stains, it changes temperature the moment you look away as if punishing you for hesitation. The taste is a argument between earth and fire, first sip, soil, smoke, the ghost of whatever altitude it was born at, second sip, chocolate that never promised to be sweet, third sip, your own pulse, suddenly audible.

We pretend the vessel does not matter, ceramic, paper, whatever is cleanest at 7 am but the cup is the frame and we know what happens to art without a frame, it gets lost on the wall, this one, leather wrapped and embossed, stamped with a B so confident it needs no last name, understands the assignment, it knows that coffee was never democratic, Sufi mystics drank it to stay awake with God, Venetian merchants smuggled it past the Pope, Wall Street drinks it to stay awake with the market, Same bean, different religion.

The accessories around it are all complicit. The French press in the back, all glass and attitude, like a chemist who moonlights as a poet, the brass pitcher, monogrammed again because one B was not enough. The sugar cubes stacked like tiny edible bricks, for people who still think they can negotiate with bitterness, even the spoon has an opinion. Everything on this table is dressed for the same opening night.

Art asks you to look. Coffee asks you to come back tomorrow, put them together and you get a ritual that refuses to be casual, you do not gulp this, you study it, the way you study a face you want to remember, the crema breaks like a fault line, the steam writes cursive and erases it and when it is gone, the ring it leaves at the bottom is the only signature that matters. The cup is empty now, but it is still not done talking.