Gone. Just gone. Two weeks of work. Gone to waste? Two minutes earlier I had been perfectly happy. The new feature worked on the first try. Exactly the way I’d described it. I clicked through the application one more time, just out of habit, and suddenly stopped. Two features that had been working flawlessly for weeks were gone. Not broken. Just gone.
There’s a certain kind of story the internet instantly falls for. You know the format: someone with just enough status to sound unquestionable, simplicity, a symbolic detail like a black coffee, a minimalist detail like a black coffee, and one sharp sentence delivered with enough detachment to pass for life philosophy: »I stopped adding sugar to things that were bitter.«
»Dump the first espresso of the day.« That was the advice, I saw in a reel the other day. A guy standing in a spotless kitchen, speaking with quiet authority. No drama, no irony. Just a clean instruction. Even if you single dose. Even if you weigh your beans to the tenth of a gram. The coffee sitting in the dead space of the grinder overnight will have oxidized. It will dull the shot. It is not worth drinking.
Today is January 1st. Not a good day for looking back on the year that has just ended. I’ve already spent a lot of time doing that — revisiting what I experienced, the successes and the wounds, the progress and the setbacks, taking a closer look at encounters and goodbyes, taking stock. Today, I don’t want to do it again.
The first time I read about Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I was sitting in a café not unlike the one in the book — quiet, a little narrow, the kind of place where time seems to gather rather than pass. Outside, the city was still in its morning hurry, but inside there was only the soft hum of the espresso machine and the faint clatter of cups.