It wasn’t the best roast, hardly imported with care from the earth.
Not imported from afar, a privilege in liquid form.
Flat, flavorless, cost-effective, fucking decaf.
It was coffee by name only, but we pretended.
Didn’t matter, though.
She quietly enjoyed the time to pause.
The old blue plastic coffee cup calmly balanced in her hands.
She slowly brought it up to her lips over a quiet conversation.
The gesture is an act of rebellion in a world of confrontation.
Others boasted, blasted, brought the house up, then down.
We were surrounded.
By both gratitude and revelry.
Over a meal, sometimes seeming packaged, brought in from who knows where the previous day.
Neither horrible, nor healing, but something, it was something.
Didn’t mean we weren’t proud, all of us, I mean, her, me, and the other girls.
We kept time.
The routine of a meal is a prayer separating our over-medicated nerves from our stomachs.
Our cores.
Wounded somehow, that had been refusing to heal.
Our stomachs were still, there, functioning.
I didn’t question others’ nerves, I knew mine were in the sea.
Nerves of steel, never said that.
Despite your nerves, though, your stomach still sits straight in your belly.
Whatever your hunger, whatever your appeal, that was up to your feet.
We pick where to sit.
Was it a chance she ended up next to me?
No, she gestured for me to join, a kindness to an outcast from the earthen realm.
An occurrence light enough to mean next to nothing.
Until we had our coffee.
In each seat sat a soul, outcast from the grace of God.
A survivor of sometimes deniable misery.
We didn’t complain, there were no tears, no the crew, we were intense.
We chose, we did have choices.
What stories to tell, what complaints against the machine to make, what humanity to share we could find within ourselves, in such straights.
We’d eaten on the outside, on the inside, we all tried to pretend, if were were lucky enough
Lucky enough
To remember a better meal.
A meal, an event, something that reminded us of the outside.
While inside, I would consider something of an altered reality.
Institutional, sure.
There was still pride in the ability to parse something to eat.
Hardly a scene, hardly an affair of high cuisine, a noteworthy way to express our culture.
Instead, we all got by the best we could.
A crew, as varied, as diverse, as any trade ship.
With whom there was no guarantee except that it would be a long, long day.
There is honor among thieves, there is honor among addicts, there is honor among those of us
Incarcerated for our own well-being
Until our insides match a better suitability for the greater good in the world outside
It isn’t that we didn’t try
But reputation, and so many indiscretions, create quite the cacophony.
Never quiet, never still, always someone in pain, the question of how to react was up to them.
Violence, a question, sedation, a hope in the ability to pass time without a care.
To whether you’d offend, get by, or make a connection.
A trauma bond is a knot that keeps the sails on the trade ship set right.
Every day the wind blew for me, my feet anchored by the weight of my trauma.
Present and able to appreciate.
To be able to enjoy a quiet sip in the hurricane was pretend a portal in time, crossing between the now and before.
Fuck the future.
Every meal was a different realm, a different day, as varied and long as imaginable.
It was hard for me to see a way to be still in such a place.
Somehow though.
She did.
So I loved her for that.
The way she drank her coffee.