A cup of coffee feels right even when it tastes like a dirty dish. Wafts of earth emit from the dark crumbs before I submerge them in a soupy soak. This pour-over extracts, ounce by ounce, alertness and cognition. Gravity leeches flavor and function from the floating aroma.

A cup of coffee always feels true for a couple of cold hands with purple fingernails, no matter the hour or caffeine level. It’s a learned measure of comfort once associated with great-grandparents and an owl painted on a 1960s mug. I never expected coffee to adhere to my own morning routine like the ringed stain permanently visible within the owl’s cranium.

A cup of coffee feels necessary now, despite the tea packets’ yearning for a turn of their own, for a drinker who grasps at verbal pathways once trod yet (temporarily?) vanished. That betrayal of confusion and cloudiness is too baffling to comprehend. Someday this cup of coffee will reveal its quaffer’s grounded spark.