Coffee

He looked around and saw with eyes that had not opened but for this morning. What guides a man when he listened to nobody and when he doubts himself? The eyes took in a shop, smoky from the roasting in its stern, active from the life that packed its walls, enjoying cups of its labor. The mug in front of the eyes was vivid. Not because it was sunny outside to contrast the last seven days, but because the eyes let the color be color. There was nothing else to see, but it revealed what lay in front of him, steaming and awaiting lips.

A window to his side revealed the dirty side of a second building, this one containing nothing worth gathering among to relax. Its constituents were invisible save for some fishing paraphernalia hung in its glass. The eyes did not mind that the model ship and waning orange floats suggested nothing certainly. It saw that though it was separated by property lines and multiple physical boundaries to the body, it was still part of his shop. As was the ocean to his other side, cold blues thrashing about along the shore, endlessly dangerous to all man’s efforts upon it. Every other soul in the shop was a stranger but he was glad they were there to mind themselves. Their being there gave him something that he could not have given himself. These were the company of this life and without them this life would be different.

But different is not so bad. Once difference can be appreciated as simply the product of alternative circumstance there is something about what is left, felt in panorama, the whole scope of the experience received, that makes it real. Men nearby spoke in confident tones on things they had only read and heard, worried to them by other men who lived and died as fast as they. The eyes listened to how their throats shook the air that gave them the oxygen to be so afraid, saw how the wood chairs supported their tired frames without them having asked politely beforehand, and wondered: Why does this give the experience a warm depth? Why don’t they feel it too?

What guides a man when he listened to nobody, and when he doubts even himself? What remains interested? The answer is written nowhere, in any stone that could forbid scripture by any who could be wrong or lie. None exist who could even mark such a stone. But the eyes wondered if it isn't the same thing that allows man to continue with or without his awareness, perfect knowledge, ideal action, or confidence, and sipped. Today was a wonderful surprise.