I wake up late on a Saturday morning and head straight to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I turn the kettle on. It begins to whistle and simmer. I turn and twist the portafilter out, rest it on the shelf and scoop out a heap of ground coffee to pour into it. It comes from some estate in the country, the name of which I cannot remember and, frankly, could not care about. This happens once you know the truth: coffee is coffee, and most things are most things. Labels do not add; they only take things away. The coffee machine puffs about, and the steam swishes until the shot of espresso starts to fall into the cup like a single stream of aromatic bliss. I wait for it to fill up.
I think of how I should’ve woken up much earlier had my doorbell not been rung by the waste collectors, who visit twice daily: morning and evening. As noble as I think the job is—for people like me, who sit and write, depend solely on those who run the world—it is still an aggravating routine. Every morning they ring the bell, and every morning I ask them, lost in my sleep, “if there was trash to give, wouldn’t a bag be right here, my dear friend, and if it is not here, why would you ring the bell?”. The boy always nods and says it’s his job, and he cannot help it. Sometimes, he mutters something, and so do I. A justifiable act. After this, I feel exhausted and sleep for another thirty minutes out of retaliation.
Today, I overslept solely because of this, and my plans to get an early weekend breakfast at some cafe were thwarted only by an absent bag of trash. Like every day, I had kept one outside in the evening. Like every morning, I regretted it. If it were a friend telling me this, I would ask them to not worry about trivial things. All annoyance feels ridiculous until it happens to us.
Even though my plans were decimated from the get-go, the coffee was still there. I could still sit down and write, and that was a plan as good as any. I pulled the curtains open. The light instantly filled the room, and I saw the blue skies. Perhaps, the day can still be saved, I thought. It was but a few hours of an uneventful morning—I have lost bigger things and lived to tell the tale.