Being Me

You are making the coffee for yourself and your wife, although you always think of it as just making it for her, even though there are two mugs on the counter and two mugfuls of coffee in the pot, always, and you never even really know which mug will be hers and which will be yours until the moment you bring both into the living room and set one down before her - still, you imagine that you are making coffee only for her.

You are not even really making the coffee at all - no one really does - the coffeepot did the brewing and the warming and the pumping and the filtering and so forth. You’re just sugaring and creaming, but not in that order, and you have a vague hunch that the sugar is not really necessary - there’s plenty of sugar in the nondairy creamer, you checked once - but still you sugar her coffee, and yours, every day. Hey, you’re young, and why drink coffee that tastes bad?

Recently you tried to gradually wean her and yourself from this reliance on refined sugar, which is bad, they say, incrementally scooping less and less of the granules into the daily brown circles below you on the counter. She surprised you right away by noticing, vaguely anyway, commenting that “this coffee’s not as good as your usual that you make.” You didn’t explain about the coffeepot doing the actual making, because you hadn’t thought of it, and just resumed adding the extra quarter-spoonful after the standard spoonful per mug that makes her coffee taste good.

You open the lid of the sugar pot and immediately plunge the spoon down into the granules. As you pull it back out, visually sizing up the tiny mountain on the end which you guess qualifies as a “heaping” teaspoon, you notice a tiny insect flying up from the vicinity of your spoon. The insect is tiny, but moving dramatically enough that you can’t imagine how you would have missed it up until now, so you conclude that he must have been trapped in the sugar pot until you opened it, trapped earlier when you brought your bowl of raisin bran over to the sugaring station for a little more than a heaping teaspoon. It was kind of bland.

The thought of the fly being stuck inside the sugar pot for the last ten minutes, buzzing around in the dark, is a little gross, you realize, but not so gross that you’re obligated to tell your wife when you bring her the coffee, as you would be if, say, you noticed mold in the creamer just as it poured into the cup - no, it’s more in the region of grossness that requires you *not* to tell her, as it would be a needless ruining of a perfectly okay cup of coffee that still will taste perfectly fine.

Besides, one of these cups is yours.