My Inner Barista

I was channelling my inner barista.

This is the kindest way to describe what happened.

There are other descriptions available. Most of them are legal. Some of them may require an incident report.

I had taken a perfectly ordinary mouthful of coffee. No drama. No warning. No cinematic tremor in the mug. Just coffee, entering the human system in the usual way, through the face.

And then, without consultation, my body chose performance.

Not a cough.

Not a splutter.

Not even a socially disappointing burp that one might pretend belonged to a dog, a chair, or old plumbing.

A hiccough.

One completely ordinary diaphragmatic spasm, arriving at precisely the wrong point in the coffee-consumption process.

The coffee had no chance.

It left me in a forward arc of such ambition that for one brief second I was not a woman in emotional distress, mid-house-move, mid-grief, mid-writing-crisis.

I was a municipal fountain.

A bitter, caffeinated, domestic water feature.

A human cappuccino machine with unresolved maternal trauma.

There was no artful fern. No heart. No elegant little swan of foam.

My latte art was more direct.

It said:

Help.

It said:

Please stand clear of the beverage.

The mug was shocked. I was shocked. The coffee, I think, was most shocked of all. It had expected digestion. It got aviation.

For a moment I sat there, stunned, assessing the blast radius.

Sofa: compromised.
Clothing: threatened.
Dignity: not present at time of incident.
Burns: imaginary but briefly dramatic.
Coffee: traumatised beyond meaningful recovery.

And then I laughed.

Which was inconvenient, because I was not in a day built for laughter.

I was in a day built from mothers and houses and all the things that will not resolve. A day of old grief, new doubt, and the terrible middle of leaving one life before the next one has had the decency to become real. A day where the mind had been circling the same questions until the questions had worn grooves in the floor.

Am I doing the right thing?
Will I regret it?
Can I write?
What will I miss?
What happens when the place you could always return to is no longer yours?

And apparently, when no answer was available, the body chose espresso-based slapstick.

There are worse interventions I suppose.

Some people meditate.
Some people journal.
Some people breathe through the soles of their feet while imagining a golden light.

I weaponised coffee through my own mouth.

It was not graceful.

But it did interrupt the proceedings.

For one blessed minute, there was no inheritance, no survey, no house prices, no new house floating like a mirage in the future.

There was only me, the mug, and the undeniable fact that I had become a one-woman Costa with boundary issues.

And honestly, I needed that.

Not the sense that my oesophagus had briefly joined a circus.

The laugh.

Completely inappropriate. Not remotely solemn. Covered in coffee.

So yes. I was channelling my inner barista.

Unfortunately, my inner barista is not trained.

She is under pressure, emotionally unstable, and should not be left alone with hot drinks during periods of existential transition.

But she does have range.

And when the day became too much for language, she found another medium.

Coffee. Trajectory. Release.