To You, Peru

To you, Peru.
To your darkened city,
your yucca root and
mango'd soul, to our
foreign feet tracing paths in your skin,
to being born again on rooftops --
to feeling
hope in a town that has lost all of it.
To the whir of motors and horns
that plague your streets and
the roar of the people chattering
in rolled r's and abandoned s's
To you, breathing life into
your Coca-Cola veins, to
the corners of pan and curry and
gasoline.

No one smokes here, do they?
I suppose you haven't fallen into Europe's
nicotine dream,
to cracked lungs and late nights with strangers,
as I have Peru.
I guess you know what it's like
to live a life unromanced by rain and tragedy —
your life just is,
and I am nearly not, I am
afflicted by words that hang in
my throat like the dead cedarwood
ceilings you showed me,
I am all insecurities, mistakes,
and mixed media,
While you just are,
a steady hum, a distant engine, a falling —
constantly falling sky.
Are you lonely, Peru?
Are you fluid, do you dance,
are you happy?
To you, Peru, is this.
To me, Peru, you are.

Coffee. I love coffee.

These past few weeks, instead of preparing for finals and thinking quality thoughts about the meaning of life, I've been cataloging all of my past and present self-destructive behaviors and dipping my toes in small, shallow pools of misery and regret. One of these behaviors is coffee drinking.

I haven't really thought about when it all started, but after reading an article on Thought Catalog about giving children caffeine, I realized that I probably had my first white mocha (yes, a white mocha, suckaz!) when I was about ten years old. My aunt was addicted to coffee — not just coffee, but Starbucks espresso drinks, which are pretty much corn syrup and milk disguised as coffee; and in sibling sameness, my mom was also addicted to the two-tailed mermaid's sugary poison. Immediately after my helpless mother saw my aunt purchase my drink, I remember her proclaiming that she would give up her addiction, realizing that her caffeinated habits could maybe probably (definitely) influence me in a bad way.

It's too late, someone should have said. Your daughter has now willingly began her journey into the downward spiral of coffee addiction. She will no longer function without it. But oh, will she try. Someone should have warned my mother.

In my apartment, where I live with four other coffee-drinking gals, we have three coffeemakers and one espresso machine. Excessive? Nah. (Absolutely). We each prefer our own type of coffee — French roast, fair-trade coffee from Haiti, Trader Joe's Breakfast Blend, Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and good ol' Folgers. We are all addicted, and we all enable each other.

What to do, what to do...

I've wondered for a while now: where's the Caffeine Addicts Anonymous group? Where do we go, those of us who can barely manage to stumble out of bed and wander to the kitchen, just functional enough to shuffle to the coffeemaker, dump water in the tank, and press the "on" button?

Don't get me wrong, I've tried to quit many times, to no avail. Something always comes up:
"I've got a big test today." "You made extra drip, can't waste it!" "Only 1 more star until my Gold card..."

It's all very legitimate. And one of few drug addictions our culture encourages. So what to do? What to do?

Back to studying, I guess... and back to my mug of steaming hot coffee. *Sip.*