You cradle a warm cup of coffee in your hands and watch the steam gently rise up to meet your olfactory receptors. You inhale deeply with your eyes closed. Before you realise it, you’re becoming nostalgic about the old days when colours seemed brighter. You even begin reminiscing about misty mornings in places you’ve never been, worlds that never existed. You hitch a ride on the steamy, undulating waves of caffeine and drift through streams of memory and imagination with a blissfully contented smile. All this before you’ve even taken your first sip.
This experience can be compared to the phase preceding a romantic date, when you concoct delicious fantasies – a preview of things as good as they can possibly get. Anything and everything seems possible at the first whiff of potential. Then, quivering in anticipation and chuffed with optimism, you delicately sip from the cup with the intention of savouring every molecule of flavour. You close your eyes happily – it is as good as you expected to be. A niggling voice suggests that you expected it to be better given the advanced publicity, but you quickly silence that traitor. No, this is excellent, you tell yourself. Then you take another enthusiastic sip. Still pretty good. Gradually, the rest of your numbed senses began to take note of your surroundings. The outside world trickles in, warm and unpleasant. Before you can say ‘failed expectations’, you’re staring morosely at the bottom of an empty cup with a lingering sense of loss and confusion that follows when you go seemingly instantly from a full cup to an empty cup with no knowledge whatsoever of what happened to the stuff in the middle. Perhaps it was swallowed by your alternate persona in a parallel dimension when you weren’t looking? Dimensional uncertainty seems a more comforting explanation than one steeped in actuality. It was a special house brew too- consisting of beans roasted in the dull flames of disappointment and ground firmly in the doldrums of reality.
Alas, the taste of coffee can never live up to the smell of it. Hoping to recreate that experience, we find ourselves addicted to 6 coffees a day, convinced that we cannot live without that seductive taste. Swirling in every cup comes the promise of something more, of that unique brew that will revitalize every aspect of your life and give you the confidence you need to achieve your dreams. The cup that changes everything. The One.
It’s not like it used to be, you confess sadly. Every taste used to be like a feast of the senses. But it only ever seems bitter now. Maybe it’s not the coffee. Maybe your taste buds have shrivelled up in defeat. Or perhaps you’re ready for a distraction. Yes, that’s it. You’re just too used to the monotonous experience. It’s not like you’re dependent. Oh no. Of course not.
Maybe you should try the caramel mochaccino for a change?
