Work Text:
Step one: Find a morning where the years don’t weigh and prepare yourself to be seen.
Step two: Open the kitchen window. If your kitchen doesn’t have a window, open any window in your home. Proceed. If your house has no windows, open the front door. Proceed. If your home has no doors, close your eyes and imagine a kitchen and a window. Proceed.
Step three: Turn on the burner in the top-left corner. If your kitchen only has two burners, prioritize the left one.
Step four: Choose a coffee maker. French presses are preferred, but Italian presses, espresso machines, and other gadgets also work quite well. If you prefer instant coffee and wish to avoid unnecessary sadness, perform step five first.
Step five: Find company. This step must not be ignored; the results won’t be the same in solitude. The chosen company must be limited to one person. The chosen person should be someone you could love. If you already love them, skip ahead to step twenty-one.
Step six: Light a cigarette.
Step seven: Make sure the lit cigarette performs a constant horizontal swing between your hands and those of your companion.
Step eight: Take the filter of the abandoned coffee maker and raise your right elbow 180 degrees from your waist to pour the ground coffee. Close the coffee maker tightly. Leave it on the heat.
Step nine: Wait between eight to twelve minutes.
Step ten: The waiting time must be filled. We suggest ballet dancing barefoot, biting your cuticles, playing any piano you might find around, kissing your chosen companion, playing cards or chess, telling a joke you know by heart. If you prefer not to move too much, take your companion and hug them as tightly as you can. If necessary, light another cigarette.
Step eleven: Listen to the muffled cries of the coffee maker.
Step twelve: Remember the time you were eleven and visited your grandparents in the mountain house and the childish arrogance of wanting to own a living thing made you set bird traps in the vacant lot by the yard.
Step twelve: Remember the dead cuckoo.
Step thirteen: Try not to become unhappy.
Step fourteen: Remove the coffee maker from the heat.
Step fifteen: Choose a cup for yourself and one for your companion. Prefer the ones with a soul. Some colors that indicate the presence of a soul are: light blue, blue, orange, yellow, mustard, bruised green, purple. Any imperfection –broken handles, worn paint, chipped rims– is also a good sign.
Step sixteen: Take the cups and pour fresh coffee into their souls.
Step seventeen: Add a lot of milk and a lot of sugar to one of the cups. The other one should remain untouched. It’s crucial that when adding a lot of milk and sugar, the cup that suffers the offense is passed back and forth between you and your companion, just like you did with the cigarette. It’s vital that your fingers brush each other in the process, and that the exchange is so grand and so generous that, in the case of a crime, forensics wouldn’t be able to identify the owner of the cup or that, in a hundred years, anthropologists would be mistaken and believe there once lived a creature with twenty fingers and four hands and probably two heads and who knows how many hearts. The cup must know, just like you do, that its existence has been shared today.
Step eighteen: Approach the window, whether real or imagined. Call your companion with a whistle or a gesture of the hand. Light a third or fourth cigarette.
Step nineteen: Take advantage of your companion’s distractions to observe them as if you weren’t afraid. Remember the first time you met under these very conditions. Look down at the intersection of your ankles and notice how much it has changed since then. Let the wonder be.
Step twenty: Find the lesson that this morning has prepared for you.
Step twenty-one: Drink