Caffeine

Today when I woke up for work and I walked outside, there was this big, big sun sitting on top of the school building. I yelled something toward it, but only a lady stuck her head out the 3rd story school window and looked around. I yelled something louder, but only the lady shut the window and the sun stayed put. I yelled something quieter and the sun blasted me. The sun stared at me. The sun blared a siren at me. I yelled something in practically a whisper and the sun lolled back and just wallowed on the steaming hot roof. So out I set. Today was a day for practically anything, but really it all would be confined within a respectable society. We would chat back and forth with little words, these little spicy, stinging pellets. We would be heaving internally and swaying back and forth with the direction of the day. I set out to face this shit, with nothing but an apple in a zip lock baggy to keep me warm and safe. Passing the sun on the rooftop I said “what up,” and continued on my way, done with the thing, but still feeling the energy that zipped from it and ran in my blood stream.

The sweat the sun pulled from me smelled like coffee (because I drink too much of it) and the saliva that was held in my spongy tongue tasted like tea leaves-- I always suck the bags clean. The skin under my nails reeked of apple peels (because I live off those tasty things) and my teeth felt warm and fuzzy-- I never brush them.

So prepared like a champ there I was. Pacing the sidewalk, there I was. It’s a beautiful world they might say, with one hand on their yankees cap or one hand on their leather puerto rican pride jacket, leaning back against the plaster walls and viewing such a concrete crapshack of a town-- of a situation-- of a place to be. I wonder what their eyeballs must be like, to produce such a great image for them. They must be clogged up with so much more dirt than mine, so that only what’s bright is able to filter through. Mine are clean and polished, coddled, expectant. Everything comes through them and you get a photo that’s not happy, not artsy, not continuous or meaningful. It is the opposite of beautiful in every way. What makes things beautiful is my skin, not my eyes. My blood. The energy that the sun pumps through me.

When I am walking to work in the 9 am sun, the feelings are coursing all over, and arrive in a bundle under my rib cage telling me I must do something with them. I must do something with them. Now. Now. Now. So I shout at the sun resting on top of the school building. “What do you want me to do?” “What do you want me to do?”

I am walking to work.

“What do you want me to do?”

There is nothing to do. Nothing. That is what stresses you out, alright? The sun’s beaming at you and provoking you, but there’s nothing to do! You’re just walking to work.

It is hard to put that away and pull open the shop’s glass door. You take a water bottle from the fridge. You bend your head and walk into the back room. You see the room all gray, the tiles all gray, the walls all gray, rising around you, and the humming freezer, the gray shelves stocked with cardboard boxes. You see a few little details that zoom up towards your vision: the pink sprinkle in the glue between two tiles. The shell of a watermelon, partially ensconced within a plastic bag. The particles in the air. The heaviness of the air. The lightness of your own breath.

Bang, bang, when you clock in the reel spins and rolls. Your arms move and out you go into a fluorescent lit world of styrafoam coffee cups and wrist burns. There’s the maroon counter top flat and clean, steralized cardboard-cutout food, and shining fucking machinery that makes whistling sounds-- so it is all as if you are inside a toy dollhouse. Controlling a cluttered, plastic world whose information and qualities enter your head through one ear and leave through the other. The customers come and their words only linger inbetween the ear drums long enough for you to satisfy them and to get them out. They don’t really exist. And in the happiness of working, neither do you.

I am giving my life over to this plastic dollhouse. Once the usual chaos transforms itself into the ordered stress and frenzy, it gives me the same druggy fix as the sun. Down through my veins again, pumping that groove right through me. I am a robot with super-flash movements and a whirring brain.

But of course they both come to the same conclusion. Which is that there is no conclusion, there is nothing-- You’ve given me this massive surge, this blast of purpose, and here I am stuck. Can’t pour the coffee no faster! I can’t spread the cream cheese no perfecter! Man, I’m doing it all! I’m going as hard as I can! I‘m sweating out coffee beans and spitting tea bags!

“What do you want me to do?”

“What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do?”

I asked my coworker this during a lull. I asked her repeatedly and in a light hearted way to try and set off the earnestness in my green eyeballs. I felt I should be filling something up, or wiping something down. But everything in the store was set and pristine. Perfect. We’d cleaned away the chaos. “What should I do?” I asked her. The lull came and it teased my bony joints.

“Nothing,” she said.

She walked away and I was stunned.

The sun stared in through the front window. The insect buzz of the fluorescent bulbs entered my skull like a thread. The calmness and emptyness left to me after the coworker left built the tension to unbearable amounts. Anything could happen today but it all would be confined within a respectable society. The idea killed me. I was on the very tip of everything. The entire world needed to drop a notch so that I could hold it in my hands.

I was leaning against a plaster wall with one hand on my donut shop t-shirt, seeing a disgusting world, but feeling its feeling in my skin. The sun I saw that morning had followed me and was sitting inches from me. I would be crippled from the halo of emotions it created. You could hear the clock ticking and the buzzing bulbs buzzing.

The afternoon is always dead.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing, nothing.” I picked up a cup, looked into its empty interior, and decided to make myself some coffee. The coffee was black and pure. It was thin and smoky. I breathed in its steam and exhaled it through my pores. The stinging heat cleared my sinuses and my mind. Oh I knew what time it was:

Time to eat my apple.

Save me, apple.