My Fix

I am addicted to coffee. I don’t know when, and at what point in my life did I develop this craving but it has firmly embedded itself in the innermost recesses of my consciousness. Everyone knows I love my coffee, even my office mates. My brain refuses to function without it. And I say inmost because it has become my panacea for everything. From sleepy mornings to depressed evenings, a cupful of that brown, thick, sweet brew makes me revive like a wilted flower treated to a generous amount of spraying and sunlight. So when I sit down to write this post the first thing I do is make myself a cup of the holy grail , my brain simply refuses to function without the hallowed steam. And once that steaming cup is in my hands this potent brew can activate dormant brain cells, making me feel all witty and intelligent, depressed neurons and make me all sunshinny and optimistic, cowering neurons and give me the courage to tackle that impossible task, mend broken hearts..er well..u get the drift..

Those two hours after each cup, when caffeine controls my life, are happy and productive hours. And I have resigned myself to this sequence of life, like the phases of an unimaginative moon...the caffeinated and the non-caffeinated...
So for everything I do, I need the stimulating companionship of this beverage. Except when I am reading. And I don’t light up when I’m with a good book. A book can easily be my nicotine patch.
Which I am hardly getting time for, this year. Which makes me look back all the more longingly to rainy evenings, to the rising sense of anticipation when I used to return from the bookstore armed with an armful of books, to keeping night long vigils because I just had to find out what happened.
Books have been an integral part of my life and they have given me experiences I could never have got otherwise. They have shaped my values ..my opinions. During my teenage years, as other teens my age would exhaust their lunch money buying “Cleo” magazines, I would sneak into my parents bedroom to snatch my father’s latest copy of “Newsweek”. And I am wistful about the times when I was reading them for the first time and wish I could get them back all over again….