7 “Coffee & Me” by Mallory Sloan

“All the little tables in the café are full. The men smoke fat cigars and the lads, stuffed into big loose jackets, offer each other cigarettes. The women drink sodas and nibble at sweets with the daintiness of rodents, to avoid smearing their ‘lipstick.’ (Lispector 69).

Clarice Lispector writes a short story, Excerpt, about a woman sitting in a café waiting on a significant other. When reading this short story, I think about how coffee and café’s work differently in each individual’s life. They bring people together, they produce ideas, they break people apart. We all have different stories in life, and the way coffee is intertwined within our stories is what makes coffee so special.

I was never a coffee drinker, until I started being left out of family conversations in the morning, trips to the local coffee shops with my roommates, and early morning sunrises watching the news. While some of these activities are more significant than the others, they still all play a vital role in my life.

Coffee does much more than wake me up and give me energy, it gives me memories, life experiences, and adventures I will take with me my whole life, while continuing to make more. If coffee play this big of a role in my life, when I have only been a consumer for less than a year, what else will coffee do for me that I have yet to discover?

Opportunities,

new relationships,

starting a new chapter in life,

ending a chapter in life,

experiencing every emotion all at once,

or none at all.