small miracles

Small miracles, angel numbers appearing to me as I make my wife’s coffee in the morning. Making coffee as a sacred act of love, providing this person who means everything to me the materials she needs to be her best self. Love as facilitation of growth, love poured in a mug to sit on her desk and remind her that she is held in my heart always. Every morning since our paths intertwined, the ritual imbues the liquid with meaning beyond itself. I’ve been better about acknowledging the magic in everything, lately. That magic feels necessary, antithetical to the clouds of doubt rolling in above me. I’ve breathed their poison for so long, let its toxins corrode my heart with vitriol and resentment. No more. I choose the magic.

Coffee, to me, has been the light along a dark pathway. Melodramatic, no? Dramatic, maybe. Anecdotes from my time behind espresso machines smell like cigarettes and fresh beans, that satisfying whiff of air as I opened the five pound bag reminding me of pleasure’s existence even before the sun has fully risen. They say our olfactory sense is the closest to memory, the most likely to evoke our past. I’m inclined to agree. I pour the beans into the grinder. Gears whir loudly as they macerate, rendering the roasted fruits of a tree I’d never meet into dust. Over and over, years turn to dust. The ritual imbues the dust with meaning beyond itself. It’s not that I don’t want to meet those trees, I like to think we’d get along. I can’t help but fear they will be long gone before I get the chance to make their acquaintance.

It’s hard to escape that feeling, lately. The stars gazing down upon my birth blessed me with some extradimensional awareness, I think. I am still unpacking that. I used to imagine I’d be uniquely suited for the end, a lonely soul prepared for a life in the wasteland. Recently, I learned the end will never come. Not like that, anyway. Spending these precious moments fretting now feels like a waste, anticipation of doomsday seems especially myopic. There is work to do.

I imagine some would say my application of emotional dimensions to the numbers appearing every morning on the tiny LCD screen is frivolous. Madness, even. I can’t get these voices out of my head. The individuals who wore these grooves in my mind never gave their etching a second thought. I get lost daydreaming about the Voyager probes hurtling through interstellar space. They carry disks of gold-plated copper, evidence of our existence. Will the gold decay before those disks are seen by other beings? Gold is unique, its nonreactive nature allows gold molecules to see millennia unscathed. That same nonreactive nature likely contributed to gold’s sacred status in days long past. An eternal material. The ideal medium for our message to the stars.

When “heaven” was introduced to my younger self, I missed the metaphor. My mind immediately conjured some physical space out beyond the outer reaches of the observable universe. I am sure they regret introducing me to the infinite wonders of astronomy before they indoctrinated me with their religion. Or attempted to, anyway. I can’t help but feel they regret having me at all. I was never a good listener, the notion of obedience lost on my head, always affixed just above the clouds. Would there be clouds in heaven? If angels are out there, who’s to say they aren’t inhabiting the ancient Hario V60 scale weighing in on this carafe of coffee?

Perhaps some would say it’s cheating, searching for integer triplets on a screen only ever meant to show four digits. To that I’d respond with a challenge. We are uniquely suited for meaning-making, as gold is uniquely suited to the vacuum of space, and coffee is suited to providing us with energy. To believe we must deprive ourselves of meaning is a cruel trick inherent to capitalist homogeneity. Much like my astronomic curiosity rendered me inert as a religious indoctrinate, our inherent meaning making could render us unproductive. After all, what could make one feel more unproductive than realizing they have been alienated from the true value of their labor all along?

My mind drifts as I pour hot water into the coffee grounds. I feel myself making these same motions, refracted across a thousand opening shifts. I must've poured somewhere in the tens of thousands of cups of coffee across the past decade. Sometimes my arm is clothed in a flannel, an attempt to hide my true form from the eyes appraising my every move through the glass divider. Other times, my arm is covered in tattoos, ink impressed upon my skin to give this body meaning beyond itself. This morning, my arm aches from resting beneath my wife’s slender shoulders through the night. I have no complaints, I trust that I can work this pain out before it consumes me, and I know my arm’s prior position means everything to her.

I see 1:11 and 333g simultaneously on the screen. I choose the magic.