day 27
Let’s go for coffee.
Aren’t they just some of the best words you can hear? Even in lockdown, where going for a walk, getting a coffee, changing your outfit, contemplating existential dread, going for a walk, changing your outfit first then going for a coffee (just to shake things up a little) are literally all you can do. There’s something that always sends a little thrill up my spine when a friend suggests it. It’s the ritual, of course. I haven’t found that I’ve missed coffee or caffeine particularly, I can get pretty high off just the smell, but it’s more than that.
At the moment, if my friend’s forget my cafeineless limbo when we go to order, they will apologise profusely – entirely unnecessarily – or forsake coffee themselves, so I always end up feeling like the not fun friend with the weirdly restrictive diet who can’t have cake at the birthday party. No one likes to feel like the party pooper. And in normal time, I am ALWAYS the one enabling other people’s bad habits. Should I get a slice of cake? Is usually followed by my suggesting, “Yes, shall we get 3??” A friend at the end of a night out asking, should I go home with them? – “YAS. And definitely deny your vegetarianism for the evening and get yo self some chicken nuggets while you’re at it”. :) :) I live life with the expectation that we’re going to die at the end… oh WAIT. And let’s be honest here, you’re really not going to regret eating the donut on your deathbed. WOW, was that too heavy? Let’s get back to some zip zap light hearted caffeine content.
In normal times, I am always the one enabling people’s bad habits.
Coffee always reminds me of awkward dates. There’s something kind of sweet about a coffee date. It’s without the ole fashioned social lubrication of alcohol, so you’re a tiny bit more forced into the truth of each other, although you probably end up spending a lot of time trying to decide on your drink of choice, considering what it says about you, and what their drink says about them. Oh wow a hot chocolate! How playful! Curious! Kind at heart! An oat flat white – I only have a sense of humour if it’s ironic and at someone else's expense, but wear hawaiin shirts completely sincerely. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet was a cultural reset, ok??
The best dates I think, always have a little bit of friction at their core. There’s flow, of course, but you’ve got to have a little bit of spice, a disagreement on the worst character in Friends, whether you think success means happiness or money (it’s money). It’s the contrast between the flow and the tension, and then the release that makes a good date. I made a friend of mine describe her coffee to me in detail on yet another lockdown walk, just so I could envision I was there, sitting inside the lid of that take away coffee cup, floating around on the creamy, milky coaster at the top. Her response? “Creamy and bitter in all the right ways”, and if that isn’t the sexiest thing you’ve ever heard, and words to live by for your ideal coffee/date then paint me yellow and call me a coaster.