Extremes

Someone once asked me why I drank my coffee so strong. At the time, I just sort of shrugged and told them that's the way I like it. And I do like it that way. Black, strong, almost thick. If I'm gonna drink the stuff, it had better pack a punch. No dirty brown water for me, I want COFFEE!

Now that I've had some time to think about it, I realize that my coffee habit is probably more a reflection of my entire being. I'm one of those folks that feels very little on the surface. Maybe it's a survival technique that I haven't been able to drop, or maybe it's just the way I was naturally wired at birth. Either way, it's just the way it is.

A lot of people who don't know me well consider me cold and unfeeling. I don't share or show my emotions much. It's hard to elicit a smile from my lips, harder still is anger or pain. Sure, I feel it, it's the expression part that doesn't happen.

A little known fact: I used to cut myself in order to feel. Or maybe it was a control thing. I could inflict the pain, tangible pain that I could then heal. A sick sort of self-loving I guess. I wasn't in the greatest of mental places, I suppose. I don't do that anymore. Haven't in more than 3 years, but sometimes the craving is there. Sometimes it's like a bee buzzing around in a glass jar, angry and desperately hunting escape. It was that way the other day, standing in the kitchen, washing bottles in the pre-dawn silence, eyes caught on the shapely handles of my knives arranged so neatly in their little block. I wanted so badly to feel the blade against my skin, melting through my skin, the warm release.

I'm over it. I don't do those things anymore. As a matter of fact, it disgusts me that I even still think about it at all.

But I am a person who needs extremes in order to feel, in order to be normal. So why do I drink my coffee so damn black? Probably to make up for some sort of emptiness that I don't even know exists yet.

And this has been a strange and disjointed post from the dark corner of my mind.