Notes: This is done for speedrent and inspired by John Cleese's "Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot", during which he announces to the audience the manner in which they can expect to die. The audience laughs. Thus:
Special Thanks to John Cleese (not that he'll ever read this, but nevertheless)
Spoilers: RENT
Warnings: multiple character death
Disclaimer: RENT is Jonathan Larson's
I lean over the hotplate and inhale deeply, close my eyes and breathe in the fumes, let them paint my throat and settle in every one of my pores. The heat and smell creep through the glass to warm my fingers, and that memory will remain hidden in the bulges of my knuckles, reawakened throughout the day to scoff the sweaty, overbearing insulation of the gloves for which I am eternally grateful. Thank you, Joanne. Bless you. But this heat is superior, because it is absolutely perfect.
I love coffee. Everything in my life revolves around coffee; every memory is connected to coffee, because it is delicious, beautiful and perfect.
Standing in the kitchen in my junior year of high school, eating breakfast, which at the time meant pudding scooped onto jagged pieces of frozen waffle and a strong cup of coffee, my mom telling me to please set a better example. There is no purpose to this memory save my sister, failing pleasantly to keep from giggling. Frozen waffles and pudding, too, is worth remembering.
April never drank coffee, but used it to cook. Valiantly April struggled to perfect a recipe for a cake of dark brown bread tasting of the bitterest coffee. She had determined that the misnomer 'coffee cake' demanded rectification. April hated coffee. As Mark once said, I should've known then.
I also should've not punched him in the mouth for saying it. I've never apologized. That's not my style.
Collins was the first person I ever met who drank more coffee than I did. He drank coffee in the morning. He drank it at night, sometimes directly before going to bed. Other times, Collins and I would stay up until three in the morning, with a pot of coffee and, if the week had been kind, Pop-Tarts. Three in the morning is a brilliant hour. The conscious mind subsides, all barriers dissolve, and with eternal probability, the most brilliant things are realized. And everything, absolutely everything, is amusing.
I miss Collins. There's only one person who knows how much, and only one person I miss more.
She is the person I have tried to recreate of coffee, who held tight to her life far longer than any of us imagined possible. In the end, no matter how fiery a spirit one has, death comes for us all. Losing Mimi nearly killed me, not from the shock--not of selfishness and hatred, as April had, but from the rending pain. It was Mark saying eat something, drink something, isn't this funny, Roger? Funny. Nothing was funny any longer. For a long time the only thing I would swallow was bitter black coffee. It kept me alive, offering both energy, a feeling of heat, and the drugs Mark had taken to dissolving when I could no longer swallow without vomiting.
I always knew coffee would save my life.
After a while I found myself forgetting. I forgot her face, her smell, her laughter. Mark played the films for me constantly, but I needed something tangible.
I tried to make Mimi out of coffee, adding milk teaspoon by teaspoon. But Mimi is not coffee. No matter how much milk I added, the perfect color of her skin I found by the opposite mixture, a cup of milk and barely a tablespoon of coffee. It was so sweet I cried.
During that period I was extremely abusive to Mark. It's true. It's horrible, but it's true. That's when he made the remark about April and I hit him. He was the one on hands and knees picking up the shattered mugs I had thrown against the walls, furious that I could not evoke a perfect coloration of Mimi.
For this precise reason, I am making coffee now, not my bitter, black coffee but a milky hazelnut nonsense that Mark likes. I am making him coffee and toast, because Mark is a grown-up with a grown-up metabolism and cannot understand eating pure sugar first thing in the morning. We keep flowers in the loft now, daisies mostly, and origami roses that will never fade. And every morning I wake up to enjoy the first few private moments of cold sunlight, cold floorboards sending a comfortable pain into my sock-clad feet. It's quiet. It's nice. The sounds of New York City are so distant, the chaos gone, and I almost like dying because it lets me appreciate these quiet moments that before I buried under anger and vivacity.
And now another moment, quiet in its own right, that of waking Mark and drinking with him this silly coffee that is not really coffee, drenching toast in it. Like every morning, we are going to eat on his bed and at some point he will see the lesion, my first, and run his fingers across the stain, and maybe he'll start to cry a little and, as he always does, forget how to stop.
There has been a tremendous pain these past few days; the nights are bad and I barely have enough energy for the days, and often I see Mark crying behind his eyes. But I'm very happy right now, letting heat and coffee settle into my bones, anticipating the image of Mark, asleep and gnawing on his pillow, and how he looks like a ten-year-old without his glasses and a six-year-old with them.
I can't live the wild life with April, for fun. I can't live with Mimi, for love. I can't live to tear it up with Collins. But there is a certain quiet peace in living out my last few days with Mark, for early mornings and hazelnut coffee.
Fin!
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