I’m made out of coffee and anxiety and one always feeds the other. Too much coffee makes me anxious and when I get anxious I drink more coffee. $2.35 for sixteen ounces of Einstein Bros Bagels coffee every morning (either the winter Cinnamon Blend or the year round Vanilla Hazelnut Blend.) Free twelve ounces of Batdorf & Bronson’s Greener Blend during my lunch break for the past week. The first day it happened I had been crying, the second day I hadn’t. Sometimes it’s nice to look like I do. It works for some people. And sometimes those people give me free black coffee.

I take my coffee black. Not really on purpose. It’s partially out of convenience and partly as a holdover from my younger self obsessing about weight loss. And partly because I can.

I’m anxious, abrasive, bitter, and most people don’t like me exactly as I come. I don’t like my personality like I like my coffee? Once, while having coffee with my mother and step-father (who both drink black coffee,) I asked them why they hated happiness. They cracked up and said they like coffee like that. I called bullshit. Whoops?

Now I get headaches if I don’t have coffee by three in the afternoon. I knew a girl, a smoker, who told me that coffee was her worst addiction. She told me that she could probably go a day without cigarettes, it would suck but she could do it. But a day without coffee would be impossible.

I went to academic camp. Satori Summer Camp for Gifted Teens. The only place I’ve ever really considered home, but that’s besides the point. It’s also the place that saw the first budding of my eventual full blown caffeine addiction. We’d go to bed late and get up early, go to breakfast, and then join the twenty person line at Thomas Hammer (an Eastern Washington coffee shop chain) and then go to class. My last year, one of the baristas got concerned. Some thirteen year old kid got a drink with ten shots. We -well, not me- got limited to one drink per day. All the baristas though I was a counselor, so my three daily Jack Hammers (coffee with chocolate, cinnamon, and honey) were safe. God damn. I miss Jack Hammers. That, my mom, and my cat, are the only things I actually miss about living on that side of the Cascades.

I just finished my sixteen ounces of vanilla hazelnut from Einstein’s. I guess I should go see if the barista who gives me free coffee is working.