(Picture here, if you will, my parents laughing uproariously at me, as they have been trying to get me to drink coffee most of my life, it seems.)
Somehow in the last few weeks it has gone from a bitter, unfriendly, if glorious-smelling, concoction to the epitome of deliciousness. I think I must have gone for it again out of sheer desperation on one of the mornings I was trying to turn back into a person who sleeps normally by not fumbling through sleeping and awake-but-dizzy until four in the afternoon or so, and dumped loads of milk and sugar in it, and lo! It was very nearly palatable. Very nearly. (On New Year's Day, when I downed a cup to get me through an afternoon of work at the deathly boring kiosk after staying up very very late with the usual lot, I spent the entire cup stalking through the house, gulping it down and shouting bleah!) And then I tried it again the next morning. Before I knew what had happened to my unsuspecting tastebuds, I was in love.
It helps that I have my own very pretty Art Nouveau mug in which to drink it every morning. But aside from the fetching mug, the flavour! It is so wonderful and cosy! The caffeine! It is so fantastic and day-starting and inspiration-bringing!
I do not have a morning newspaper, and I prefer to read novels on my stomach, so what I am trying out now, after the ten minutes it usually takes me to read my email and all of the Twitter that happened during the night, is writing. By "trying", I mean "I've done it a couple of times this week", but it is working out rather all right. And the jump of caffeine has my brain all energised and ready to think of interesting things. I am on my forty-second page! It took me three months once to write a nine-page short story! I am improving! (Meanwhile, Catherynne M. Valente Twitters that she has finished writing her splendiferous online serial novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, which she started a mere couple of months ago. I flush emerald.)
And my last gulp of coffee has gone cold, Evangeline needs to finish being unconscious, and a large black cat has made himself comfortable in my lap. It's a fey, misty morning -- you can smell Autumn coming, even when you don't hear it in the farewell calls of nightflying geese and the wuthering of the wind, or glimpse it in the brief glimmer of red and gold hidden in the furthest branches of the trees.