The drip drip drip of the Nespresso machine keeps me company.
I watch the brown pool rise and rise, filling my cup.
I take a sip, flinch unconsciously. It is bitter and scalding.
The cool foam coats my top lip.
No one is awake. It is 4am. I shouldn’t be awake.
Still, I am.
I will be nineteen in nineteen days.

This is not how I imagined my nineteenth; though my birthdays never really go the way I expect.
This is not how I imagined this month, this year.
There are worse things than being homebound; there are also better things.
I am trying to reconcile the existence of the two.

I am lucky enough to be (almost) nineteen.
To be safe
To be healthy
To have a home
To have a stable family income

I am unlucky enough to be (almost) nineteen.
To be mentally ill
To be isolated
To feel useless
To have a family spread thin

The two can coexist. I am lucky (and unlucky) enough to see this.

In nineteen days, I will be nineteen. Few people will know unless I tell them. There are bigger things to consider in the world. There are smaller ones too. I lie somewhere amid it all. I am just a girl— a faceless, healthy girl— amid a world of strife. The sun will rise, I will turn nineteen, and it will set; I doubt I will feel any different. The world will keep turning, with or without me. I am lucky (and unlucky) enough to recognize this.
Quarantine has provided me a bit too much time for introspection, I think.

My coffee is finished. The brown drops on the cup’s bottom resemble a smile. I am lucky enough to notice this.

They will bury me in the red robe don't you know it.

It was your red robe for smoking
cigarettes

                                                                                                     on the stone patio,

            Saturday mornings                      with Nespresso and milk.

You must be brave when you tell me. That you have put a strange flesh inside you. If you turn your eyes, left to right a barn owl will die. If you move them right to left a child will go hungry. And when you say only the truth, then my dear, my stomach will eat itself alive, and my brain will start forgetting stories right there.

I see a photo one hundred years old of men stalking foxes in the snow and I feel a sudden death. A sour breath from a sour mouth. A dry skin hand covers a very bad dry cough. I am tearing up in the picture of wind and scorn and blue winter skies. It can be so heavy I have to sit. I go to a couch, three extra feet long, for my legs to not be stuck in the groove, or I find a chair with an ottoman. I need to be supine. Twenty nine is no year to wander. The dingos play at night, and you have taken up new flesh. I have everything to say now, and something will happen too. Still I am waiting with my eyes down and my feet up. Still.

There is more to coffee
than taste and aroma-

Have you ever heard,
the steam stampede?

Perhaps not, Nespresso,
ne pas deranger,

The silent, odourless,  
senseless experience.

Moka! the active volcano
of hot spring geysers,

An eruption of black lava
from a slow canter to a

Gurgling gallop ending
in the steam stampede.