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Today’s article is more like a stream-of-consciousness exercise. Expect it to be nonsensical, incoherent, or just simply obscure. If it has to have a topic, let that be coffee, summer afternoons, and Greece. I can’t begin to describe how many memories, thoughts, and feelings this deceptively innocent combination brings to me. These musings I called “timeless”, but I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally: these musings, in actual fact, are outside time altogether.

They are timeless because they are connected neither casually nor temporally, but through affect, meaning, and… coffee. I said in my article on timelessness and experience:

There is an abstract reality hidden beyond the – largely illusory – veil of time, which connects you as a child to you as an adult. It also connects both those “yous” with all other “yous” that have or will ever have existed.

Coffee, Summer Afternoons, and Donald Duck

Every time I’ve had a cup of coffee, ever since I was a kid (yes indeed), a grain of sand has fallen onto the beach of my experiencing. And with every new cup of coffee, with every new grain of sand, I revisit that beach. I play with the sand, let it trickle through my fingers. I build castles – made of coffee, summer afternoons, and Greece – and think that I want another cup of coffee. Right now, as I’m typing these lines, I’m having a cup of Greek coffee in a Donald Duck mug. Peculiarly, Donald is smiling. Shouldn’t a proper Donald Duck coffee mug showing him livid and screaming?

But yes, back to coffee, summer afternoons, and the forgotten seas of my childhood in Greece; those warm days of June, when the sun began to crawl behind the tall buildings of Athens. I’d make myself a cup of Greek coffee – or a glass of iced frappé coffee – and go to the balcony. I’d spend unknown time there – timelessness within timelessness – sipping the grain of sand, swallowing my future memories, linking myself to the tomorrows that were yet to come. Unconsciously, I would imagine myself in the future thinking back about myself in the past. Which is what is occurring right in this moment.

The Cup of Coffee that never Comes

Every time I feel like having a cup of coffee, I unconsciously desire so because I want to vicariously relive every single past cup of coffee. It’s never perfect, though. It’s never Greece enough, it’s never summer enough, it’s never afternoon enough. I’m chasing a Platonic cup of coffee, the idealistic reconstruction of memories that, by definition, cannot be reconstructed. But I will keep trying, at the same time fully aware that I’m continuously constructing new memories, which in the future I will attempt to reconstruct.

Now the cup of coffee is empty, and Donald Duck should be even more upset. He isn’t, and neither am I. That cup of coffee wasn’t “the one” either, but it was a good cup of coffee. It produced this chunk of experiencing (I dare not call it “text”), so it will have to do for now.

Until the next cup of coffee.

Note: Feel free to also read these three coffee stories of flash fiction