The Gift that Keeps on Giving

For Christmas,

Another year a man

gave me a kitchen appliance

I did not ask for and

I knew you were in dangerous water.

The coffee press and teapot were from my favorite store,

it’s true, but then you said:

“Now you can have good coffee,”

and I bristled.

You see, I loved my little coffee maker.

A four cup Mr. Coffee I can set on a timer

and wake up to someone having made the coffee

because I have never woken to

someone having made the coffee.

I wake earlier than everyone in my house

so I can hear the first birds of the day and

have my thoughts uninterrupted, even the dangerous ones.

I had good coffee already by way of a simple programmable timer

and the love of my past self

for my future self

to bother.

But now I know what you think of my coffee

which would have been our coffee.

The following spring, I canceled our wedding.

After a year and a half of engagement you had refused,

with some open cruelty,

to pick a date,

a venue,

set a budget,

select groomsman.

Sir, you had not proposed to a woman who

wanted to go to the court house quietly.

I had waited for so long to find love again that

I wanted to celebrate with everyone I knew.

“Look,” I would declare, “patience in the face of pain is rewarded.”

“No one wants to come to a second wedding,” you told me.

Apparently even the groom, I decided.

For a long time after I put the coffee press in a box and tucked it away,

wishing my broken and humiliated heart could fit inside.

But then I thought of the paper waste of the coffee filters and

the way they linger in the compost like cobwebs and

I thought of the beautiful red of the coffee press and

I thought

I am being stupid.

So, I put a few bumper stickers on the curved sides

And found that they survive the dishwasher just fine.

The coffee in the morning

with the birds

is good for the same reason it was before:

Past Me loved Future Me enough to bother.