Jasmine tea.

The tea I always believed tasted like purple, and was disappointed to discover that once outside the smoky haze of a grungy coffee shop, it was nothing of the sort.

Jasmine tea.

That tea into which I delve my thoughts as I grab my pen to catch the fleeting memories of summers long past and winters long thawed.

The first time I had jasmine tea I was in this same coffee shop. This same table. This same chair. The only difference is the emptiness in the chair besides me. I write line and rhyme, only to scratch them out with the same pen that saw me give birth to them. Nothing fits. Nothing works. Nothing speaks to the thoughts spinning in my cup as I absentmindedly twirl the wooden stick in my jasmine tea. Some of my best poetry I wrote while sitting in this very chair. At this very table. In this very coffee shop. And here I am again, but the words aren’t flocking to my paper like they used to. What is missing? What isn’t the same? I know the answer all too well – it’s him.

How is it that what I feel most is his absence? If cold is the absence of heat, then loneliness is the absence of him. A cliché I would never say, if it weren’t for the fact that no better metaphor comes to mind. He isn’t here along side of me like he used to be, staring at me as I would hurriedly write down as many ideas as I possibly could, like a child attempting to snatch every piece of candy from the shards of a broken piñata. We rarely spoke, but it was enough to know that if I chose to look up from the chaos on my paper, I could find peace in his eyes. Those eyes of black tea. Never mind that I would rarely look up, or that I have never really liked black tea. His eyes were but a necessary remedy to various ailments that plagued my mind.

The hustle of the coffee shop lulls me. People enter. People order. People leave. Just like in my life. No one stops to give me a glance. No one stops to even say hello. But that’s ok. I don’t care to look up anyway. The only thing that interrupts the insanity on my paper, or possibly add to it, is the click-click-click of my pen. Pen tip goes in. Pen tip comes out. Pen tip goes in. Pen tip comes out. It’s amazing how easily amused I am when I can’t write. I feel as if I’m drowning in my emotions but my well worked mind can’t create a single coherent phrase. In other times, I would call my muse. But my muse is gone, probably fell into someone else’s coffee cup on her way to see me. Stupid muse. No doubt she’s deep inside a coffee-junkie’s stomach dictating my lines to a mediocre poet writing love poems to his flavor of the week. How bitter of me to say that. Almost as bitter as this damn jasmine tea. It’s bad when even my jasmine tea doesn’t taste the same. I keep adding sugar and more sugar but all I succeed at doing is making the tea more unbearable.

I look up. A girl is writing her midterm paper. The four empty cups beside her tell me it’s due tomorrow morning. It’s late already, past midnight. I look down at my paper and see nothing solved. Among the black blotches I don’t find the epiphany I promised myself I would find. My papers flutter as a cold breeze enters the coffee shop. It serves as my only reminder of the frigid cold that awaits me outside. What am I doing here? I said I needed time to write and I have spent the past two hours sipping on a jasmine tea can’t seem remember what jasmine tea really tastes like. I keep thinking of him even when I said I wasn’t going to. Thoughts of him penetrate my chaos. I can’t help it any more than can the scent of the jasmine flowers avoid passing through the white paper that confines them. I close my eyes. I don’t see a purple that doesn’t exist. I see black. I hear his laughter. I hear my own. I hear the verses of hundreds of poems yet to be written. I open my eyes.

I’ve had enough.

I take my papers. I take my pen. I take my poetry book, now full of unwritten poems. I leave my jasmine tea on the table. I walk to the door. I Open it. And I step out into the bitter cold. But not without first ordering a black tea, to go.