Sunday
He woke up, exhausted from another night of drinking with strangers. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was caught in his hair and alcohol was still on his breath. Sunday. He liked Sundays now, that hadn’t always been the case. He rolled out of bed and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. His head was pounding and his thoughts racing, but not in a productive manner. He barely recognized the man staring back at him. The cost of forcibly shutting his brain off on an almost daily basis was great, and it showed.
Onward. He wandered into the kitchen and put some water on the kettle. Coffee was one of his favorite small pleasures. The smell, the taste, and the ritual of making it with his old and beat-up french press. He’d recently switched coffee brands, having been a loyal fan of the green package for years, but he’d grown tired of it. He now drank coffee of the blue and gold package variety, and so far it had been really good. Four and a half minutes later, he poured about half a french press’s worth of coffee into his favorite cup. He loved this cup. Technically, it was his roommates, but, like most things in the apartment, it belonged more to the apartment itself than to any one person.
The cup was white, with little colorful splotches all around the outside and just inside the lip. As if a child had taken a miniaturized paintball gun and shot at the cup until his interest was lost. He like this cup because it was happy and colorful, but devoid of any vapid or idiotic decrees on the outside. He poured a generous splash of milk into the cup and watched it dance around, slowly merging into one. Now what? The coffee was too hot to drink, so he took his cup and made his way into the living room, and sat on the couch.
His roommate had also done all of the decorating in the living room, which meant it lacked any personal touches that made it his. He liked it this way, but often had to explain to new guests why the Hindu Aum symbol was displayed proudly and repeatedly on little colorful flags on the wall, when he himself wanted nothing to do with religion of any kind. He had changed slightly though. Directly after leaving his religion of twenty-five years, he had been vehement and nigh unto militant when it came to denouncing all religion as harmful fraud conceived of by those in humanity who wanted to control others. Now, with over five years between him and his departure from religion, he had grown softer in his views. He still viewed religion as a fraud in all senses, but could understand how one would find solace in the stories that religion weaved.
He stared out the window. It was windy. It was almost always windy here. At first this had bothered him, the incessantness of it. By now though, it had grown to be a source of comfort. Even in the darkest of times, if he stopped for a moment, he could almost always hear the wind outside his window, or go outside and feel it on his face. It was a steady companion he could hold on to when nothing else made sense or felt right. It brought him back to reality when he felt buried and trapped in his own head.
He turned his attention away from the wind outside and back to his colorful coffee cup. It had cooled to the point where he could take a large pull of the wonderfully pleasant liquid, and this he did. He didn’t consciously feel its effects anymore, he drank too much for that. Yet it still somehow provided him comfort. In his childhood religion, coffee was forbidden, and thus drinking it brought punishment. It seemed absurd to him now, but there had been a time when he had drunk coffee in secret, and lied to his family about the lingering scent of a latte in his childhood home.
That all seemed so far away now. He mostly saw his parents and siblings on a computer screen and talked to them about their home remodeling efforts or their doctor appointments. There was a tacit agreement that nobody talked about any of the hard things. The things that kept them up at night. Instead, discussions about sports teams and golf courses dominated their interactions. He took another sip of his coffee and checked the time. Half past noon. He had better get going or he’d be late.