this list is unrealistic
day 11: 100 days
I can’t find my copy of “Three Dog Life.” It’s not in any of the usual places or even the unusual places. Maybe I left it in the car. For a while, I was carrying it around in my purse and taking it out at stoplights. For a brief moment, this made me think of those billboards about texting and driving. I remembered I had read an article about people watching movies in traffic — their brains half commuting, half far away enjoying an episode of Andor. No one sends out public service announcements about reading and driving because it’s not dangerous. I tell myself, “It’s not like I’m doing both of them at the same time.” I walk out and check, and it’s not in the car. I cannot find it, I’ve looked for fifteen minutes now, and I only have a little over an hour alone, a small panic is starting to form in my throat - a little lump.
I wanted to read a bit and then write and then exercise, and then make blueberry muffins for my friend who had given me soup a month ago. I will be returning her gigantic, glorious mason jar, which I had planned on filling with something equally delicious and soupy, but have not had the time — and so muffins instead. This list is unrealistic. I know that. I have an hour and a half. But it doesn’t matter — it’s still there — the desire and the growing fluttering hard-to-swallow feeling. The fluttering has me very nonchalantly making my way into the kitchen and pressing the button on the coffee grinder. No one is here in the house, still, I realize I’m doing it quickly as if someone might catch me. I reach for a filter and click the little lever on the side, watching it glow orange, heating up the kettle. I’m ignoring any conscious thoughts, any pauses that might open up a space in my head where the grown-up me would have an opportunity to raise her eyebrows and say, “Are you sure?”
I gave up coffee months ago. And I got a little on my high horse about it — how well I was sleeping. How much better, calmer I felt. But now I feel adamant that if I had the caffeine, I could remember where I put my book. I could probably remember everything. My sister also gave up coffee this year, like me, after a bout of illness in January that had us in bed during the same week, thousands of miles apart. She switched to Matcha, unaware she had switched right along with everyone else in the country. It was green. It was better. Smoother. Less jittery. But the other day, I asked her, “What was in her cup?” when she sent me a photo, and she confessed, she had switched back. “She was so tired.” I felt some permission creep in. The permission has been sitting now for a few days, warming me up for this moment, where I have now been nursing half a cup of coffee and feeling, I think, what I can only describe as delight. This morning, I lay in bed and read an article in Vanity Fair about Pedro Pascal. They mentioned all the fuss about his coffee order being made public, a quad-shot iced espresso, that he wished people didn’t know about. I felt myself wondering if perhaps people who have an energy about them all have a certain obscene level of caffeine intake. Don’t get me wrong, Pedro is magical all on his own. But his espresso order makes me believe that he probably knows where all his books are. And oh lordy, what that man could accomplish in an hour, I’m sure, would put my list to shame.
