There's something to be said for the warm silence of a moment alone between someone and a hot mug of black coffee.
instead of “coffee and contemplation” or whatever that Netflix cop says, it’s more like “coffee and pick through your own brain desperately trying to remember any and everything until you reach too far ahead and tumble spectacularly to earth like a bastardized Icarus.”
He can’t remember his little sister’s name but could recite every greek myth his mother ever told him. Blessed be the modern miracles of science.
The smell of oranges and cigarettes remind him of home, his mother’s perfume and the smell of his father’s cigars that clung to the old wallpaper years after he was gone.
Two little sisters with gaps in their smiles and blonde pigtails, his family huddled around one old table in their cramped kitchen, all five of them laughing and eating cabbage rolls as the snow swirls out in the alley.
Those are always the best dreams, when he wakes up with the taste of polenta still in his mouth before it turns to dust as he takes in the empty apartment.
It’s too cold, too bare, too quiet.
Cold days are the worst. The heating in his unit has been long shot, and the landlord dodges his calls so often he wonders if the man has made a game of it.
Sometimes there are phantom pains, ones that creep into the bones and sinew of his arms, make him want to claw away and rid himself of the frigid feeling, set his very skeleton on fire.
In lieu of lighting himself on fire, he bought a space heater, though the pitiful thing is barely enough to fill his small bedroom, drafty windows and poor insulation fighting battles too big for the little robot.
So he settles for coffee. It’s shit but it’s hot and amnesiacs can’t be choosers, nor can people in therapy be pyromaniacs. (this is a theory he hasn’t tested yet)
On the really cold days, he haunts the streets, a ghost in a black leather jacket, but nothing really looks the way he remembers.
He imagines thick stone walls guarding the lost part of his brain, and a tiny version of himself chipping away at the stone with a tiny pickaxe but it won’t budge.
He's felt brighter lately. If he closes his eyes, he can see the green ivy snaking through the cracks in his stone walls, creeping up and up as if reaching its tendrils like fingers toward the sun.
If I am to be icarus, I want to feel the embrace of sunlight before my fall.