Coffee
She came to the world as a challenging and tough child of 5 kilos.
From the villages around, pilgrim travelers and farmers came to see the huge child they had heard about in the absence of other exciting news. Rarely did something so out of the ordinary happen and the rumour about the child spread quickly. It is unclear what her mother thought of all the attention, but the story was passed on from village to village.
Not entirely unexpectedly, she grew up and continued her life as one size bigger than everyone else. For a long time she walked around with shoes from men's stores. But despite her greatness, she was timid and devout as a lamb. She loved animals and everything that grew in nature, could walk in the woods all alone for hours and found a calm space in the fresh air where a breeze caressed her cheek. She had a beautiful life ahead of her and took advantage of it like no other. That she would move on in life in a way that no one else from the village had done before was no surprise. So it felt natural to everyone when she decided to move to the big city to work and explore life.
She got her first salary after thoughtful work, bought beautiful clothes and dropped down in her very own armchair to just happily look out the window and at everything that passed by. Like so many others in history, so came the day she met love. She had never met it before and, unsurprisingly, she became convinced that it was precisely this man who was chosen for her and she clung hard to idea of it. He was, unlike her, a small man with a dull soul who did not care much about anything around him. For him, life was just a way of working, not thinking.
Now you may wonder what makes a down-to-earth woman fall for such a banal little man, but to do that we must dare to talk about what was far below the surface. And there was a longing. Not so much a longing for cohesion and love as a completely unconscious desire to fuse with a body, with nature, with something that cannot be explained. Something genetic one person would say, something much more psychological and shaped by our upbringing says a second, something spiritual about auras says a third, something that need not to be said at all, says the fourth. Either way or all, so it was. She wasn't attracted by who he was or what he said, but when they made love she found herself completely engrossed. He touched her in a way that made her feel bad, but also in a way that made her want more. They never talked when they made love and he was neither tender nor interested in what she needed. Still, she fell like she was in a trance and when everything was over, she could never explain to herself what had just happened.
She considered leaving him a couple of times but always fell back to the same thought, that he would never touch her body again. And that idea was worse than many different scenarios she created in her mind of their lives together. Then one day when he finally proposed, completely without feelings and with a buttery look, she answered to the surprise of many, yes. She, who was so happy, soft and who loved life had now said no to it.
On the day of the wedding, he was neither easier nor happier than before and the uncomfortable guests saw how annoyed he was with taking the wedding photo where he had to stand on a telephone directory to reach her greater height. No one later knew that that very photo, where no feet appeared, was full of secrets and dark moods from a very small man. The years went by, they worked, moved, bought houses and had children. Everything passed with no happiness, no joy. A practical fusion. The children grew up, broken and injured. They never got the attention they would have needed. She could never help as she wished, he needed her more. She could never talk to the children as she imagined, he resented her and explained clearly that they needed no words. She was not allowed to travel with the children, that money he wanted for his car. She never cooked the food the kids loved, he wanted his own dinner and the kids would have to adapt. When the children moved out she would never go and visit, he needed his cup of coffee in bed every morning. He had clearly told her that and expected nothing else.
Everyone saw, that she was making that coffee. Every morning she got up first of all to serve him a cup. A cup of the damned coffee. But what people never knew and never understood was her carnal life. She had chosen her fleshly need rather than to be loved. And the desire it gave her weighed more than anything else. That power was more important than living a beautiful life. She realised that she had given up a lot but regretted nothing and stuck to her choice. The day he died, all the inexplicable things for which she lived also disappeared. Other people did not fully understand her grief, the secret and deep sorrow she could not explain to anyone. She struggled with those thoughts for a few months but then gave up, life and body, and a short time later she passed away. A woman who chose to live not for another man, not for herself, but for her desire.
