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A Coffee Story (or, How I Spent My Morning)

It’s one of those mornings.

The kind of morning where you awake, bleary-eyed and bewildered as to how you arrived in this bedroom, this body.

The kind where you open your eyes to find your shirt has twisted completely around you, your pajama pantlegs are hitched up past your knees, and your hair has fashioned itself into an intricate network of Sailor’s knots.  Your mouth gives off the distinct impression that it spent all night gumming a gym sock like a Werthers Original.

And now you are jonesing for a caffeine fix.

So you sit up, spend a moment orienting yourself to your new vertical-ness, kick off the sheets, swing your knees to the edge and let your feet, Lewis and Clark, scout the way to the kitchen.

But upon arriving at your destination, something’s amiss.  You go to scoop some coffee and…

Huh.

You stand there for a moment, unconvinced.  Let out a little cough.

Perhaps you’d be more apt to appreciate the dramatic irony of the situation if you were able to fully open your eyes.

Another minute of silent reflection.  Then, you start grasping at straws:

You check the coffee machine just to be sure you didn’t already scoop coffee, then suffer a mild stroke that damaged the coffee-scooping short-term memory region of your brain.

Coffee?  Are you in there already?  Do I need to go to the hospital?

No such luck.

You stand there stupidly in the center of the kitchen, scratching yourself.  Giving this information a minute to sink in.

“Well that sucks,” you say out loud, to no one in particular.

Then you get serious.  You consider your options.  You do a quick equation in your head, calculating the time it would take to get dressed and brushed and scrubbed into a version of you passable enough to venture into the outside world and adding that to the distance to the nearest coffee shop, then subtracting by how much you despise Starbucks’ burnt-tasting coffee and insane price tag and, finally, dividing by how weak your resolve is to go entirely stone-cold caffeine-sober today.

You’re not exactly sure what the final answer is since you’ve always sucked at math, but you know you don’t want to go.

But, then again, you know you have to.

Because it is, after all, one of those mornings.

The End.