First Coffee

Coffee in prison is not coffee. Coffee in prison is brown water, microwaved, with creamer made from no animal that has ever lived. I had not thought about real coffee in years. I had stopped thinking about real coffee around the time I stopped thinking about the smell of cut grass and the feeling of sand. The list of things I stopped thinking about was long, and I had not made it on purpose. I had stopped because thinking about them did not change the situation, and not thinking about them sometimes made the day shorter.

The morning after release I walked to a coffee shop. I had been told about this coffee shop by my sister. It was four blocks from the apartment my parents had rented for me. The coffee shop existed. The four blocks existed. I walked them.

I ordered what my sister had told me to order, because I did not want to look at the menu and discover that I no longer knew how to order coffee. The woman behind the counter said “for here or to go” and I said “for here,” because I wanted to sit at a table, and I wanted to drink the coffee out of a cup that was not made of plastic, and I wanted to be a man drinking coffee in a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning in the country I had been born in.

The coffee was good. The Tuesday was good.

I sat for a long time.