Of Coffee and Swampmonsters.

I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and I don’t plan that ever changing. Cigarettes disgust me.
For some reason I have always associated coffee with cigarettes. Coffee is a nasty habit. It is as much of a problem as those smokers with cigarettes.
And it makes your breath smell.
And it makes your teeth look like filthy brown paper bags.
I remember being bored in a café and amazing myself at the concept a “Bottomless Cup”. The fact that one could sit in a restaurant, café or diner for hours drinking from the same cup of coffee with endless refills amazed me. Such a trap, it made me think people only drink it because it was cheap and they can get it in large quantities.
Fuck me.
If she read this she would know this isn’t even about coffee. Yet, here I am, writing some stupid crap she’ll never read. Just to let her know she’s messed up.
That whore.
Anyway, here’s the true topic:
I guess I had never really known who Rachel was until then. Strange, as we had been friends for about two years at that point. Pseudo-friends, really, I suppose. Our friendship went completely through Natasha, and to a lesser extent through Guy.
Rachel and I had never exactly gotten along, though, simultaneously, we had never exactly not gotten along. There was always something too crude about her. She made no sense. She laughed at things that were sad. She seemed mean-spirited. She was driven; obsessive. Far too willing to do anything in the pursuit of the fulfillment of her own narcissistic needs. And she was cheap. And could be gotten in large quantities, physically.
We are all narcissists. Everyone. Everyone in the whole damned world.
We are all obsessive.
We are all crude.
We are all cheap and can be gotten in large quantities.
We are all coffee.
But we all wear masks to hide the face-paint.
We all cover ourselves in sugar and cream to mask our foul tastes.
Not Rachel. Rachel has no mask. Her face has been wiped clean of all paint. There is only one Rachel. Whichever direction you see her from; front, back, up, down, north, south, east, west, all around. She is not one to be one way with her parents, another with her friends, and another with her enemies. She is a stagnant pond. She is static. She will never change. And she probably wouldn’t even breath if it didn’t serve her.
Rachel is a stagnant pond. Murky and shallow. Scum covered. Encrusted with generations of algae and decaying plant matter that soil the waters, threatening to turn her into a dismal bog, which traps any who dare risk to enter and learn her mind forever beneath the slimes. Strange how the people who wear no masks or paint are often the hardest to understand.
I have always been captivated by stagnant bodies of water. Whenever I come across a pond that is sitting still, I am always overcome with an overwhelming compulsion to throw a rock in it. And as the stone breaks through the filthy surface, for a brief moment the stagnant pond ripples and a small portion becomes clear. I have always been overly proud of my ability for penetrating people’s mindsets.
And so it became with Rachel, as I would chase her around whenever we were together, my pockets filled with stones with which to break a hole through her surface in my futile quest to know her mind.
What I hadn’t fully understood was that Rachel was a bog far more than she was a mere stagnant pond, and as such my stones, even though hurled with such deadly accuracy, simply struck the surface with a wet thwack and sank beneath her muddy, putrid depths. Never to be seen or heard from again.

…It was late. I was half asleep. Sitting on Natasha’s mattress. My back resting on the dresser. Natasha resting in my arms. Rachel staring blankly at a computer screen.
“Why are you still here?” She asked, casting a languid, enchantingly uninterested glance in my direction.
I knew she was trying to intimidate me. Ever since Erin broke up with her she had been after Natasha. It was becoming a problem. A problem that would eventually cause her to be unceremoniously cast out of our friendships. I regret this. The same regret an addict of coffee or cigarettes must feel in the morning when they finally give up their nasty habits and, in effect, their energy.
“You are not intimidating.”
She grinned, a cocky challenge, “What is it that you want?” She asked, unquestioningly.
“What is it that you want?” I asked in answer, expecting her utilization of rhetoric to obscure a lack of any clear answer. Stupidly assuming she was a human being, as I always had.
“Coffee, a cigarette.” She replied, rising from her seat to raid Natasha’s brothers kitchen and cigarettes.
I stopped trying to understand her. I understand her perfectly. Her breath smells. Her teeth look like little filthy brown paper bags. She is a horror show. She is beautiful. She is the foundation, from which we all begin. She is dirty. And she is pure. Untainted by eye-appealing masks and face paints. She is coffee. My coffee.