Aroma of Yesterday

Crush the leaves. Boil the water. Water in cup. Leaves in strainer. Strainer in water. Wait. Check the leaves. Wait again. Remove the strainer. Compost the leaves.

I sit at my small, cheap trestle table, waiting for sunrise. The darkness is cold, but I wear no protection from it besides my worn flannel pyjamas. I like the cold, here, now. The cup in my hands is warm. Too warm. Hot. It feels like fire to my frozen hands, but I hold it gently. The tea it contains is black, like the sky without stars, but hot, like the sun. I do not taste it. I feel the heat, burning through my hands and lashed away by the breeze. I see the darkness, with depth and form sharpening as my eyes dilate to accept more light. I feel the warm steam flowing up and condensing on my chin and cheeks. I smell the tea.

Every morning of my life, my father would make black tea and sit and wait for daybreak. When I was an infant he would hold me, if I was awake. Some later days, when I could walk where I chose, I would sit with him and watch the sun rise. He started making me a cup of tea too.
We never spoke in those moments. In the beginning I tried to talk, but he was always silent, and soon I learnt silence as well. I sat and watched the brightening east sky, smelt the black tea aroma curling round both our faces. I never saw him take a sip of tea, but somehow it was always empty when we went inside. I tried to drink mine, but the taste rankled at my tongue and throat and so I pretended to like it. It was to please my father, I think. I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t like it. Somehow, I had the idea that he would be angry, or sad, or something else, if I told him that I didn’t like his tea. We rarely spoke at other times, so I don’t know how I thought I could predict his reaction accurately, but I did, and so I was silent.
As the years went by, I started staying up later and stopped getting up early. My father kept watching the sun rise, but alone, just like he always had before I came along. Time passed. I got older, he got older. I graduated high school, university, got a job and prepared to move out. My father helped me move my stuff, and he seemed happy for me, in the bittersweet way of parents. As I was saying my final goodbyes, he pulled me back inside, alone, to the kitchen. When he closed the door, he looked around the room as if to verify that it was empty, and slouched. His strong posture and broad shoulders seemed to shrivel beneath his shirt, and for the first time I realised how old he was. I felt guilty for letting him carry my heavy belongings, and giving him the more unwieldy end of some pieces of furniture. He had carried it all without complaint. Now he looked spent and deflated, like a vacuum-sealed bag of sticks. Acting as if this transformation had not taken place, my father stepped forward into the kitchen and spoke two words. “Watch. Remember.”
He then got the cup and leaves and strainer and made himself a cup of black tea in front of me. I stood behind him, watching and desperately trying to remember everything he did. He never said a word throughout the entire performance, and almost acted as if I wasn’t there. His actions were swift with experience, not slowed to let me easily take them in. He expected me to keep up.
When he was done, he cleaned every utensil and surface he had used. He left the kitchen with the cup of tea clutched in his claw-like hand, leaving me alone with the lingering aroma of tea.
I followed soon after, and found him just as I remembered: tall and broad shouldered. The old, shrunken man that I had seen in the kitchen was gone, preserved only in my memory. Even then, I knew it was a precious memory. I had been given one glimpse, and he had asked—no, told me to remember. So, I focused on trying to etch the entire scene onto my mind. I knew that if I let slip from my mind-fingers just one detail, one modicum of that moment, it would be lost forever to the abyss in which live the truly dead. It would join those whose memories have faded and whose songs have ceased to be sung, and with it would fall a fragment of my father. I could not let that happen.
I started making tea in the way he showed me, to instil in muscle and bone what the mind would forget. I tried to drink it, but still could not get more than a few gulps down my throat. I hadn’t yet started waking to see the sunrise, but I woke just early enough to make tea and throw it out before I rushed to work.
Soon after I moved out, I received word that my father had died suddenly in his sleep. The time he had showed me how to make tea was the last time I saw him alive. At his funeral, I wondered how he had known.
I did not cry until the next morning, when I made tea for myself and renewed my efforts to drink it. As I forced the third sip down my throat, it stung in my eyes and I choked on my tears, coughing up tea and stomach acid and sobs. The coughing subsided and I was left with just my sorrow, tears slipping down my cheeks and the occasional silent sob or keening cry forcing its way through my lips. Occasionally, I would stop crying, only for the smell of the tea refill my lungs with fresh grief. I sat with my tea until it cooled and I could no longer smell it. I sat until the sun was high above the horizon, until my face was dry and my lungs were empty.
I called in sick to work, and poured my tea into the compost with the weeks of previous undrunk teas.
The next day, I started getting up earlier to watch the sunrise. I made tea every day until it became muscle memory, and sat with it as it cooled and as the day warmed. The compost flourished, with fresh tea leaves and water every morning.

Now, as I sit here, I smell the tea. It is a smell that brings peace, in the bittersweet way of children. It brings and holds memories, building and keeping them in my mind so I don’t forget. But now it is starting to bring peace in its own right: the peace of early morning frost; the peace of tranquil purple skies; the peace of day breaking over the crust of the world.
I look across the room, across the sky, across the earth. I look across the past and between life and death. I look through my own eyes back at myself and my memories—they are one and the same, really—and at the edge of the world, at the meeting of pink sky and blue earth. I gaze over the years and miles and, like a golden yolk splitting and pouring life into the sky, day breaks.