Mocha

I never used to understand the coffee drinkers I encountered in foreign literature, until I found myself, blinking, in the land of decadence.

Last week, alone on a Friday, on the eve of promised thunderstorms, I went into a tiny coffee shop. On the counter were Chemex flasks. The most expensive thing on the menu was a mocha. I asked for one.

It came with surface-deep, frothy mocha art. I chose to sip at the bottom of the heart, where the voluptuous halves met in a sharpened point. The more I sipped, the more distorted the frothy heart became, but oh, each sip was like a kiss from a very weak lover, who leaned forward, covered my lips with coquettish, ticklish delicacy, and then fell away, backwards, leaving behind a tingly, slowly evaporating coat of memory that simultaneously made me burn for her and yet want to delay our next rendezvous.

Deeper and deeper into the cup I drank, my hands tilting the cup at greater and greater angles, the cup obscuring more and more of the coffee shop, until my world was the world of the mocha, the cup's rim pressed against my face, a strange kaleidoscope. As I watched, cock-eyed, the coffee waves wash toward me, I wished that I could make this narrow concern my life. And then I was with the dregs, and the waves were no more, and I cried unnoticed, my face pressed into an upheld coffee cup.

Of course, this is all very melodramatic without a context. And yet if this were tacked onto the end of a narrative, no matter how clumsily, you would be moved. You might even cry too. But that is not what I want to give you. What I want to give you is the moving qualities of a good mocha, because that, a mere material object, you can replicate. You can own.