There is a warehouse I visited once, somewhere in the hills outside a distillery town, where nothing was happening.

Rows of oak barrels stacked three high. Dim light through slatted windows. Air thick with something sweet and faintly like varnish. No machines running. No one working. A guide told me, almost offhandedly, that this room does more for the whiskey than any other stage in the entire process. And it does it in total silence, for years, with no one watching.

That is the part people leave out when they talk about whiskey. They talk about the mash bill. The still. The distiller’s cut. The craft, the science, the making.

But whiskey is not made. It is aged into.

Clear spirit goes into a charred barrel, and then, visibly, nothing happens. For a very long time. Underneath that nothing, everything is happening. The wood breathes. The spirit pushes into the grain and pulls back out again. Sugars caramelize. Harsh edges get absorbed into the oak and slowly, patiently, replaced with vanilla, char, dried fruit, leather.

And every single year, a portion of it simply evaporates. Distillers call this the angel’s share. The whiskey that disappears into the air before anyone ever gets to taste it.

Nobody claps for a barrel in year four.

Nobody applauds the angel’s share.

It just goes.

**

I think about that warehouse more than I probably should, because it is the closest thing I have found to describing what it actually feels like to build something quietly. A skill. A body of work. A voice. Years of it, before anyone else knows it exists.

You know this if you have ever done it.

The stretch of nights where you are working on something nobody asked you to work on. The version of you that gets sharper only in private, in the dark, with no deadline and no witness. The hours that never show up on a resume or a highlight reel, that simply sit there, compounding, mostly invisible, occasionally evaporating without ever amounting to anything you can point to and say there, that was it.

That is barrel time.

It is not glamorous. It is not even always enjoyable. But it is the only part of the process that actually produces character. The thing that separates a spirit with something to say from one that is just alcohol in a bottle.

**

Here is what the warehouse will not let you forget, though.

A cask left in a rickhouse forever is not patient. It is forgotten. At some point, someone has to walk down that row, find the barrel, pull the bung, and pour it into a glass. That is not a betrayal of all the quiet work that came before it. It is the entire point of the quiet work. The oak did its job so that, eventually, this thing could leave the dark and be tasted by someone who was not there for any of it. The pouring is not separate from the aging. It is the reason the aging happened at all.

I bring this up because I think a lot of us treat the barrel room like it is the whole story.

We romanticize the grind. The solitude. The years no one saw. And we should, because that part is real, and it is hard, and it deserves respect. But somewhere along the way, a lot of quietly excellent people start to believe that staying in the dark is the integrity. That if the work is good enough, it will announce itself. That asking for the glass, walking it to the table, pouring it out in front of people, that this is somehow lesser than the aging itself. A concession. A performance.

It is not.

It is the second half of the same craft.

**

A whiskey that never gets poured is not more pure for having stayed hidden. It is just unfinished.

The angel’s share still takes its cut either way. Some of what you build quietly will always be lost to time, no matter what you do with the rest of it. That loss is not optional, and it is not a referendum on the quality of your work. It is simply the cost of the years. Which is exactly why the part you can still pour out matters so much. Nobody gets those evaporated years back. But the barrel that is left, the one still sitting in the dark right now, is worth walking down the row for.

So if you have spent years building something. A skill. A way of thinking. A habit nobody watched you form. At some point the work stops being about the barrel and starts being about the glass.

Somebody has to be willing to walk the row, find the good cask, and pour.

Usually, that somebody has to be you.

**

Next time you are holding a glass of something that spent a decade in the dark before it ever touched your lips, tip it a little for the years nobody saw. For the angel’s share that never made it out.

Then drink it anyway.

That is what it was aged for.

Pouring suggestion: a single barrel bourbon, neat, no ice. Something with a long finish. You want a glass that keeps talking after the first sip, the way good quiet work tends to.

If this one sat with you, the kindest thing you can do is forward it to someone who has been in the barrel a little too long.

— Until next time ✦

Let me tell you about the night I stopped pretending I was fine. It did not happen in therapy. It did not happen in a journal at 2am with a candle burning down to nothing and a playlist called healing era mocking me from my phone. It did not happen the way I planned it, because nothing real ever does.

It happened in a glass. Small. Coupe-shaped. The kind of vessel that looks too delicate to hold anything serious, and yet there she was — sitting on the bar in front of me like she had been waiting. Like she had always been waiting.

Dark as consequence. Foamy on top the way the ocean looks right before it decides to swallow you whole. And that color. God, that color. Not red exactly. Not wine. Not blood. Something in between all of those things. Something that had no name yet and was not asking for one.

Scarlet.

I picked her up and the whole world tilted two degrees to the left and stayed there.

✦

ON COFFEE

Here is what nobody tells you about espresso. It is grief in liquid form.

I mean that. I mean it the way I mean everything — completely and without apology. Coffee is the thing you make when someone dies and you do not know what else to do with your hands. It is the first thing you reach for when the alarm goes off and the weight of being a person crashes back into your chest like a returning tide. It is the ritual of continuing. The small daily act of choosing to be awake even when awake is the harder option.

Espresso is coffee that decided to be honest. Stripped down. Concentrated. All the warmth and all the bitterness together, no water to soften the blow. Just the truth of the thing, pressed and pulled and offered to you straight.

You either love it or you cannot handle it. Most people cannot handle it.

✦

ON VODKA

And then someone had the audacity — the absolute nerve — to pour it into vodka.

Vodka. The drink of people who have already made their decision and simply need the courage to follow through. Clear as intention. Cold as the version of yourself you become at the end of a long year. Vodka does not ask how you are doing. Vodka already knows.

Espresso and vodka. Grief and resolve. The soft and the hard. The warm and the cold. They should not work together. They should cancel each other out. They should create chaos inside the glass and be undrinkable and wrong.

But they do not. They become something completely new. That is the part that undoes me every single time.

✦

NOW ADD THE SCARLET

This is where I have to slow down and ask you to stay with me.

The scarlet is not a color. The scarlet is the moment in a person’s life when they stop being who they were and become who they are. It is the flush of recognition. The heat that rises when you finally say the true thing out loud after years of keeping it folded in your chest like a letter you were afraid to send.

It bleeds into the drink slowly. You watch it move. You cannot rush it. It has its own timing and its own intentions and it does not care that you are impatient or afraid or both at once.

Red moving through dark. Warmth moving through cold. Something alive inside something that was already complicated.

I have been the espresso. I have been the vodka. I have been the foam on top that looks composed right until the moment someone touches it. But I want to be the scarlet. I have always wanted to be the scarlet.

The part that arrives late and changes everything. The part that is not subtle, is not apologizing for the space it takes up, is not asking whether now is a good time.

She came in scarlet and she did not explain herself and she did not have to.

✦

THE TUESDAY

I ordered this drink on a Tuesday. Nothing night. Nobody night. The kind of Tuesday that exists purely to make Wednesday feel deserved. I was sitting at a bar by myself, which I do not do, which I had told myself I would start doing more of, which felt brave until I was actually doing it and then felt simply loud with internal noise.

The person next to me was crying. Not dramatically. Not the kind of crying that performs itself. The quiet kind. The kind where the tears just fall because the body has run out of other options and this is now simply what is happening.

I did not say anything. I ordered my drink. The drink came. Scarlet as I described it. Alive. Present. Unapologetic.

And the person next to me looked at it and laughed. Actually laughed. Through the tears. The way you laugh when something is so unexpectedly beautiful in the middle of something hard that your body does not know which emotion to lead with and so it tries both at once.

“That looks like how I feel,” they said.

Yes. I thought. Yes it does.

✦

Some drinks are just drinks. Some nights are just nights. Some Tuesdays are exactly what they look like and nothing more.

But sometimes you order something and it arrives and it looks exactly like the feeling you have been trying to name for six months. And the words finally come and the tears finally come and the laugh finally comes. And you are sitting at a bar on a nothing Tuesday next to a stranger and you are both, for just a moment, completely understood.

By a drink. Which is absurd. Which is the most human thing I have ever experienced.

You have been shaking together the things that should not coexist. You have been holding the contradiction. Doing this quietly and without credit and without anyone telling you that what you were making was beautiful. It is beautiful. You are beautiful.

Order the drink. Sit at the bar alone on a Tuesday. Let it be the color it wants to be.

That is my whole advice. That is everything I know.

— Until next time ✦

There are drinks that ask nothing of you. Water. Sparkling water. Sparkling water with a twist of lemon if you are feeling theatrical. These are my drinks. They are clean and honest and require zero emotional bravery to consume. I have built an entire identity around them and I stand by it.

And then there is beer. Beer is a different kind of animal. Beer does not sit quietly at the edge of the party watching everyone else. Beer walks up, sits down, looks you in the eyes, and starts a conversation you did not know you needed to have.

I found this out the hard way. On a Thursday. In a basement in Dobbs Ferry, New York. With a Budweiser I said yes to bef

ore I had finished thinking about it, and a roommate I thought I had completely figured out.

I had figured out almost nothing, as it turned out. About him. About the beer. About myself.

ACT I

The Thursday That Required a Drink

I had been in New York long enough to love it and not quite long enough to feel loved back. That Thursday I came home from work, sat on the edge of my bed, and did what any reasonable person does when they are far from home and running on empty: I cried. Properly. The kind of crying that has no single cause and therefore no clean solution, the kind that is really just your body finally submitting an invoice for everything you have been refusing to process.

My landlord Carl was upstairs. A good man. But this was not a shareable grief. It lived in the chest, not the throat. It was the Boston ache, the specific loneliness of being somewhere new and having people around you who like you but do not yet know you, and the difference between those two things is enormous when you are alone with it at night.

“A good beer, like a good Thursday, does not announce what it is going to do to you. It just starts.”

And then my roommate appeared in the doorway holding two Budweisers. He raised one toward me the way you raise a question you are not sure will be welcome. I said yes immediately, which surprised us both.

We went to the basement. We put on Pradeeps of Pittsburgh. We cracked the cans. And what followed was, on the surface, the most unremarkable evening imaginable. Two people watching television. A drink that cost less than a coffee. A Thursday that had no business becoming anything worth writing about.

The best ones never do, going in.

ACT II

The Can, The Episodes,The Slow Opening

Episode 1: The first few sips. Here is what nobody tells you about your first real drink: it does not taste like alcohol. It tastes like permission.

I held the can with the careful curiosity of someone handling something they have kept at arm’s length their whole life. Cold on the outside. Building quietly on the inside. This is exactly, I would later realize, what unexpressed grief feels like too. You hold it. It holds you back. Neither of you announces the arrangement.

The first sip tasted like the beginning of something I did not yet have a name for. Not the beer itself, which was, let us be honest, a Budweiser and therefore fine but not remarkable. What I tasted was the decision. The yes. The deliberate choosing of an experience I had spent years politely declining.

Episode 2: The loosening. Somewhere in the second episode of the show, something in me began to open. Not dramatically. Not all at once. More the way a jar lid gives after you have been working at it for a while and then suddenly it just does. I was warm. I was present in a way I had not been all day, all week maybe. The show had a plot and I was following it with the sincere investment of someone who had finally agreed to pay attention.

This is what a beer does that sparkling water never will: it dismantles the bouncer at the door. The one who stands between you and your own feelings checking credentials, asking everyone to please wait, insisting the venue is at capacity. One Budweiser in, and the bouncer had taken a very long break. Everything was getting in.

Episode 3: Full arrival. I was not gone. But I was not where I had started either. I was laughing too freely at things that were mildly funny. I was rooting for characters I had met twenty minutes ago with the ferocity of someone who had known them for years. I had declined snacks in a voice that belonged to a slightly softer, slightly braver version of me, the version that apparently lived inside the can.

He, beside me, was navigating his own version of all this. We had stopped talking somewhere around episode two, which was not awkward but comfortable in the specific way that only happens between people who have quietly agreed they do not need to perform for each other anymore.

Episode 4: The Part Where the Beer Told the Truth

And this is where things got strange. Not bad strange. The other kind.

The show went quiet. A scene of two characters not saying the thing. You know the scene. Every show has one. And in that quiet, in the dark, my roommate said something. Out loud. To me.

In the kind of voice that does not belong to the version of a person you have been interacting with for weeks. In the voice that belongs to the real one.

I will not tell you what exactly. It is not mine to fully share. But I will tell you this: it was heavy. It was true. And it was the last thing I expected from the person I had assigned to the warm, uncomplicated corner of my life.

I turned and looked at him. He was still staring at the television. In its blue glow I could see something on his face I had never seen there before. Not sadness exactly. Exhaustion. The deep kind, the kind that accumulates over a long time and only surfaces when your defenses have been quietly lowered by something cold and amber and honest.

The box I had built for him, the uncomplicated, cheerful, good-for-a-laugh box, simply ceased to exist. Because the person sitting beside me had been carrying something enormous. In the room three doors down from mine. The whole time. Without telling anyone.

I said something back. I do not remember it word for word. Something honest. Something that had been sitting in my chest all evening waiting for exactly this temperature, this light level, this particular combination of bad television and cold beer to make it sayable.

Episode 5: What the Can Already Knew

Here is the thing about a drink like this, a real one, the first one you let actually mean something: it does not give you feelings you did not already have. It does not manufacture connection or invent intimacy from nothing. It just removes the layer of careful, polished, well-managed presentation that stands between you and the feelings you were already carrying.

What unfolded after that was not a therapy session. It was not dramatic in any cinematic way. It was two people in a basement, talking in the dark with slightly less armor than usual, discovering that the things they had each been quietly carrying were, at their core, the same shape. The same homesickness. The same gap between being liked and being known. The same exhaustion of being new somewhere and pretending it is not hard.

“We had been lonely in the same house at the same time. The beer did not create that. It just finally introduced us to it.”

I laughed when I realized it. He laughed too. Not the hysterical slightly-drunk laugh from earlier in the evening, but the real one. The one that arrives when something has been unbearably heavy and then, suddenly, becomes something you can share the weight of.

The show ended. We went upstairs. Drank some water, said goodnight, went to our rooms. Nothing resolved. Nothing fixed. But the house felt different walking up those stairs. Not because anything had changed in it. Because I finally understood what was actually in it.

I logged into work the next morning. Of course I did. But Friday felt lighter. Not solved. Lighter. And the beer, by now long finished and the can in the recycling, had done something no amount of sparkling water ever could: it had put me in a room with myself, and with someone else, and refused to let either of us be polite about it.

Some drinks are not about the drink.They are about the door.

A Budweiser is not a remarkable thing. You know this. I know this. It is not a craft beer with a story. It is not something you linger over or describe to your friends the next day with any real specificity. It is cold and carbonated and it gets the job done and that is approximately everything there is to say about it as a beverage.

But some drinks are not about the beverage. They are about the door the beverage opens. The room the door leads to. The conversation that was already waiting in that room for someone to finally lower their guard enough to walk in.

I said yes to that beer because I was sad and tired and the alternative was sitting alone with my feelings in a room that was not quite home yet. What I did not know was that the yes was less about the drink andmore about everything the drink was standing in for: permission. Openness. The radical and slightly terrifying act of letting a Thursday night become whatever it needed to be, rather than what I could manage.

“The beer did not fix anything. It just made fixing seem less urgent than feeling. And sometimes that is the entire medicine.”

There are drinks in your life you consume just for the plot. Not because you need them. Not because they are good for you. But because they are the thing in front of you on the night when the you that is careful and managed and perpetually in control has run out of good reasons to stay in charge. You crack the can. You let the evening happen. You find out what was already in the room.

Sometimes it is just a show. Sometimes it is just a buzz and a decent night’s sleep. And sometimes, if the Thursday is the right kind of terrible and the can is cold enough and the room is dark in exactly the right way, it is the conversation that splits the before from the after.

Do it for the plot. The drink already knows where it is taking you.

Let me tell you about the exact moment I forgot my ID and accidentally ordered something that changed the way I think about people. I was at one of those restaurants in Boston where the lighting has been considered carefully and the menu uses the word composed and everyone around you seems to have made better decisions about their evening. I could not order wine. I could not order anything that would help me feel like I belonged at that particular table. So I looked at the bottom of the drinks menu and I pointed at the Jarritos pineapple. Four dollars. Maybe five with the markup

Read more

Still water is reliable. Still water is

there every morning, every night, every forgettable Tuesday. You drink it without thinking. You do not linger. You do not feel anything in particular. You put the glass down and move on with your life and you do not think about still water again until you are thirsty.

Sparkling water is different.

Sparkling water makes you feel something the moment it touches your mouth. Something sharp and immediate and slightly startling every single time, even though you knew it was coming. It surprises you on purpose. It knows exactly what it is doing.

I have been drinking it for years and I still catch my breath a little. Every. Single. Time.

I want to talk about what that feeling actually is. Because I do not think it is about carbonation. I think it is about the specific kind of person sparkling water represents in your life. The one who does not let you go numb. The one who keeps finding new ways to make you feel the thing you thought you were done feeling.

The one who is, technically, just water. Just a person. Just someone you know.

And yet.

· · ·

PART ONE · THE TEXTURE OF IT

You Already Know
What It Feels Like.
I Am Not Talking About Water.

“The bubbles do not apologize for being too much. They are not too much. You were just used to nothing.”

The first time someone handed me a glass of proper sparkling water, not the flat supermarket kind but the cold, deeply carbonated kind with actual bite to it, I did not expect to have feelings about it. I was not prepared for the way it would move through me. Sharp at first. A little aggressive. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if you like it or if you just cannot stop.

Both, it turns out. It is always both.

Still water asks nothing of you. You drink it and it does its job quietly and without incident and you thank it in the morning when you are no longer thirsty and that is the entire relationship. Functional. Reliable. Completely unremarkable.

Sparkling water has a texture. An opinion. It arrives with a point of view and it does not soften that point of view because you seem slightly overwhelmed by it. You adjust to it. It does not adjust to you. And something about that, something about the absolute refusal of it to be anything other than exactly what it is, is the most attractive quality a drink has ever had.

The bubbles do not apologize for being too much. They are not too much. You were just used to nothing.

· · ·

PART TWO · THE PERSON IT REMINDS ME OF

The One Who Made
Still Feel Like
Settling.

There is a specific person I think about when I open a cold can of Topo Chico at the end of a long day.

I am going to be careful here. Not coy, just careful. Because some things deserve to be said precisely or not at all.

There are people you meet who recalibrate you. Not dramatically. Not with a speech or a declaration or a grand gesture. Just by being so completely, unapologetically themselves in your presence that you start to realize you have been drinking still water your whole life and calling it enough.

Sparkling water is not better than still water in any objective, nutritional sense. They are the same water. The same molecules. The only difference is what has been added, what has been pressurized, what has been forced to hold that tension just beneath the surface until the moment you open it.

Some people are like that. Holding entire oceans under pressure. Perfectly contained. And then you open the conversation and the thing just fizzes everywhere and you are standing there completely delighted and slightly wet and wondering how something so simple just did that to you.

“They are not a different kind of person. They are the same person, with something added. Something pressurized. Something that has been held.”

· · ·

PART THREE · WHAT IT TEACHES YOU ABOUT WANTING

You Cannot Go Back
to Still After This.
That Is the Whole Problem.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about sparkling water.

Once you start drinking it regularly, still water starts to feel like something is missing. Not wrong, exactly. Just absent. Like a conversation that is perfectly pleasant and completely leaves no trace. You drink it. You are fine. You do not think about it again.

That used to be enough. Now it is not. And you cannot unknow that.

“The problem with people who have texture is that everyone else starts to feel smooth in a way that used to feel like enough and now just feels like absence.”

The problem with people who have that quality, that carbonated, pressurized, always-surprising quality, is that they set a new baseline without asking your permission. They do not mean to do this. They are just being themselves. But you leave conversations with them and re-enter your regular life and something about it feels slightly flat for a while and you cannot explain why to anyone without sounding unhinged.

You are not unhinged. You just know the difference now. That is its own kind of problem.

· · ·

PART FOUR · THE LAST SIP

It Goes Flat
Eventually. Drink It
While It Fizzes.

Sparkling water goes flat. This is the one thing nobody in this metaphor wants to talk about and I am going to talk about it.

You leave the glass out too long and the bubbles slowly, quietly disappear and what you are left with is water. Just water. Still water again, as if the whole thing was a temporary condition and not a fundamental nature. As if the fizz was something that happened to it and not something it actually was.

I do not believe that. I think the fizz is still in there. Just waiting for the right pressure. The right temperature. The right moment to be opened again.

But that is a conversation for another essay.

“Drink it cold. Drink it fresh. Do not leave it sitting out on the counter going quietly flat while you wait for the perfect moment to pick it up. There is no perfect moment. There is only now, and the bubbles are alive right now.”

“Still water is fine.

Fine is not the same thing as alive.”

· · ·

You know the difference now.

You have always known the difference.

You were just calling still water enough

because sparkling felt like too much to ask for.

It is not too much to ask for.
Order the sparkling.

And if someone in your life makes you feel like that, cold and sharp and completely alive in your chest,
for the love of everything, do not leave them sitting on the counter.

Seven issues in. Seven drinks. Seven essays about home and grief and almost love and a bhaiya in Boston who gave me large when I asked for medium.

And I just had the most unexpectedly good idea of my writing life.

Someone suggested that brands could buy me a drink and I would write about it. And I sat with that idea for about forty five seconds before I realised it was not just a brand idea. It was an everyone idea.

You. A reader. A stranger. A brand that makes something people drink. Anyone. You pick the drink. I write the story. That is the whole thing.

Every single essay in this series started with a drink and ended somewhere completely unexpected. Chai became a meditation on grief and fathers and the second cup that goes cold. Diet Coke became a love letter to the one constant in a life of distances. A medium hot chocolate at Dunkin became the story of the first person in Boston who saw me.

I do not know what your drink will become. That is the part that makes this the most interesting thing I have ever offered.

This series has always been about more than what is in the cup. You know that if you have been here from the beginning. The drink is the door. What is behind the door is always something I did not know was there until I sat down and started writing. And that is what I am offering you. Not a review. Not a sponsored post dressed up in nice fonts. A real essay, in this voice, about whatever the drink unlocks.

“You are not buying an advertisement. You are buying a door. What is behind it is mine to find and yours to keep.”

WHAT YOU CAN BUY ME

Any coffee. Any variation. Any origin.

Espresso, pour over, cold brew, a gas station cappuccino at 6am. If it has caffeine and a story I will find the story. I always do.

Any tea. Any culture. Any ceremony.

From masala chai to matcha to an English breakfast in a paper cup. Tea has more stories per sip than anything else I have ever put in my mouth. Prove me wrong.

Any cocktail. Any occasion. Any regret.

Alcoholic, non alcoholic, the kind you drink at weddings, the kind you drink after them. I will write about what it feels like to be the person holding that glass at that specific moment. Which is always more interesting than the drink itself.

Anything else. Literally anything.

Nimbu pani at a roadside stall. A protein shake that tastes like ambition and chalk. A Shirley Temple at a bar where you are the only sober person. The stranger the brief, the better the essay. I mean this sincerely.

HOW IT WORKS

01 — You pick the drink.

Any drink. The only rule is that it has to be real and I can actually get my hands on it and sit with it and taste it and think about it until it tells me something worth writing.

02 — You tell me why.

Optional. But the best briefs come with a reason. The brand that says we make something and we think it tastes like a fresh start. The reader who says my grandmother used to make this. The stranger who just types the name of a drink and nothing else. All of these are valid. All of these become something.

03 — I drink it. I write it. I publish it.

In this voice. With this honesty. No fake enthusiasm. No brand speak dressed up in literary fonts. Just the drink, the feeling, and wherever the two of them take me at 7am with a blank page and a cup I did not choose myself.

04 — Everyone gets the essay.

Published here. With full credit to whoever bought the drink. Read by everyone who has been here since the chai essay made them cry in public. Which is a specific and growing number of people and they are exactly the right audience for whatever you are trying to say through a drink.

“I will not write a single word I do not mean. Not for anyone. Not for any amount of money. Not for the most beautiful brief that has ever landed in my inbox.”

You buy the drink. I write the truth of it. The truth is always worth more than what you paid for.

WHO THIS IS FOR

This is for the brand that makes something people drink and wants a story around it that does not read like a brand story. That reads like a person who sat with it in a city far from home and found something in it they were not expecting.

This is for the reader who has a drink in their life that deserves an essay and has been waiting for someone to write it. Your grandmother’s recipe. The drink you always order when something goes wrong. The one that tastes like the summer you do not talk about. Send it to me. I will write it and I will mean every word.

This is for the stranger who just has a feeling about a drink and wants to see what happens when someone takes it seriously. That is the brief I am most excited about. The stranger with just a name and a feeling and absolutely no explanation for either.

One drink. One essay. One story you did not know existed until I found it.

Get in touch → buymeacoffee.com/whatidrink

I did not go to Dunkin Donuts for the hot chocolate. I went because it was close and I was cold and I needed something warm. I stayed because someone behind the counter said something in Hindi and my whole nervous system exhaled for the first time in months.

Let me tell you about the most important transaction I have ever made at a Dunkin Donuts.

I asked for a medium. He gave me a large. He charged me for a small. He threw in a donut. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, before I had processed what was happening, he said something in Hindi.

And I just stood there at the counter of a Dunkin Donuts in Boston, Massachusetts, completely undone by a sentence I have heard ten thousand times in my life.

Because here, in this city, in this language, from this person I had never met before, it was not ten thousand times. It was the first time. And the first time always undoes you.

ON BHAIYA. WHO HE IS AND WHAT THAT WORD MEANS.

Bhaiya means older brother. But if you did not grow up with this word you cannot fully understand what it means because it is not really about blood and it is not really about age. It is a form of address that carries an entire relationship inside it. It means I see you as someone safe. It means I am placing you in the category of people I do not have to explain myself to. It means older, wiser, from the same somewhere, carrying something similar. It means you are not a stranger even if we just met.

I did not arrive in Boston with a bhaiya. I arrived with two suitcases and a confirmation email and the phone numbers of three people I had met exactly once. I arrived into a city that was going to take months to feel anything other than enormous and indifferent and full of people whose contexts I did not share.

And then one ordinary morning, in a Dunkin Donuts that I walked into because it was the closest warm thing to where I was standing, I found one.

He is from Nepal. I am from India. We do not share the same country or the same food or the same specific version of the specific homesickness that belongs to people from our part of the world. But we share Hindi. And in Boston, that shared language is not a small thing. In Boston, that shared language is a whole universe compressed into three minutes of conversation over a counter while he is technically supposed to be serving other people.

ON WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN A CITY SPEAKS YOUR LANGUAGE FOR THREE MINUTES

It is not even what he says. It is that he says it at all. It is that he looked at me across a Dunkin Donuts counter in Boston and recognised something and decided to reach across the distance with it. That is not a small act. That is someone choosing to see you when they could have just taken your order and moved on and nobody would have blamed them for it.

He chose not to move on. He stopped. He asked where I was from. He told me where he was from. He told me about his family and I told him about mine and the line behind me grew slightly longer and neither of us mentioned it and somewhere in that three minutes he handed me a large cup and a donut and I stood there holding more than I had ordered in more ways than one.

He gave me large
when I asked for medium.
That is exactly
what he did.

ON WHAT BEING SEEN BY A STRANGER DOES TO A WHOLE CITY

WHAT CHANGED IMMEDIATELY

The Dunkin Donuts became a place with a person in it.

This sounds obvious and it is not. Most of the city, for a long time, was a place with people in it. Crowds of people. Efficient, purposeful, perfectly pleasant people who held doors and said sorry and moved through the world with competence. But a place with a person in it is different. A place with a person in it is somewhere you belong to a little. Somewhere that has your order memorised and your face filed and a warmth that is specifically directed at you rather than generally at whoever is standing at the counter.

WHAT CHANGED SLOWLY

The neighbourhood started to feel like it was mine too.

When you know one person on a street the whole street changes. It becomes a street where someone knows you. And a street where someone knows you becomes a neighbourhood. And a neighbourhood becomes a city. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But bhaiya was the first pin on the map. The first person in Boston who would notice if I did not come in for a while. And knowing that someone in this city holds that space for you, however small, however casual, changes the entire atmosphere of being here.

WHAT CHANGED PERMANENTLY

I understood what home is actually made of.

Home is not a location. I have written about this before, in the chai essay, in the irani chai essay, and I keep returning to it because I keep finding new evidence. Home is not the address. It is not even the people you chose to leave behind when you packed two suitcases and moved across a continent. Home is the accumulation of people who see you. Who hold a version of you in their minds and are glad when you arrive. Bhaiya sees me. In a Dunkin Donuts. In Boston. That is home happening in a place it had no right to happen and I am so grateful for it that I do not have adequate words.

ON THE HOT CHOCOLATE ITSELF. WHICH I SHOULD PROBABLY MENTION.

It is Dunkin Donuts hot chocolate. I want to be clear about this. It is not artisanal. It is not hand crafted from single origin cacao. It is not the kind of drink this series usually turns into a meditation on home and belonging and the texture of being known.

And yet.

It is warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. It is large when I asked for medium which means it is generous before it is anything else. It is free donuts on top of a conversation in the language I grew up in. It is the drink that a bhaiya hands you across a counter and every single time I hold that cup I feel the specific warmth of being the person someone decided to look after without being asked to.

“Being seen by someone unexpected does not just change your day. It changes the city the day happened in.”

Before bhaiya, Boston was a city I was navigating. Competently, even. I had my routes and my usuals and my rhythm. But navigating is not the same as belonging. Navigating is what you do when you are moving through something. Belonging is what happens when something moves through you.

Bhaiya moved through me. His kindness, his Hindi, his complete lack of hesitation in deciding that I was someone worth the large cup and the free donut and the three minutes of real conversation, moved through me and rearranged something. Made me softer toward the city. Made me trust it more. Made me feel that if Boston could produce a bhaiya it could not be entirely indifferent to me after all.

One person. That is all it takes. One person who sees you and decides to act on it. One person who gives you large when you asked for medium because they looked at you and knew you needed the large and did not wait for you to figure that out yourself. That is the whole thing. That is what changes a city from a place you are surviving into a place you are living.

what I want to say to him that I probably never will

Bhaiya does not know he is in an essay. He does not know that I have been thinking about the way he handed me that first cup for weeks now and trying to find the right words for it. He does not know that the three minutes of Hindi changed the entire atmosphere of Boston for me or that I think about his specific version of generosity every time the city feels large and cold and indifferent to my existence.

He just knows that I come in, that I usually order a medium, and that I always leave with a large. He knows my general direction from his shop and approximately what time I tend to appear and that I will stand at the counter longer than strictly necessary because the Hindi is worth more to me than I can say without making it weird.

He knows I say shukriya when I leave. Which means thank you. Which does not begin to cover it.

There are people in your life who do not know they are holding you together. Who are just doing their job, just being themselves, just handing out large cups to people who asked for medium, and who have no idea that on the other side of that counter someone is filing them under: the reason this city became bearable and then became beautiful.

Bhaiya is that person for me. In Boston. In a Dunkin Donuts. On an ordinary Tuesday that turned out to be not ordinary at all.

THE ONLY ENDING THIS ONE COULD HAVE

I asked for a medium.
He gave me a large.
He charged me for a small.
He threw in a donut.
He said something in Hindi.

And I stood there
holding more than I came in for
in every possible sense
and thought:

SO THIS IS
HOW IT HAPPENS.

Not with a ceremony.
Not with a moment you can point to
and say: there. that was it.
That was when this city became mine.

Just a counter.
A large cup charged as a small.
A free donut.
Three minutes of Hindi
in a city of English.

A bhaiya
I did not arrive with
and could not have planned for
and cannot imagine Boston without.

Shukriya.
For the large.
For all of it.

END OF ISSUE · WHAT I DRINK · NEXT SIP COMING SOON

I want to tell you about gratitude. But not the kind that arrives clean and obvious and ready to be quoted. The kind that arrives late. The kind that shows up quietly in a café on an ordinary Saturday and taps you on the shoulder and says: look at how far you have come. Look at this. Look.

Read more

Let me tell you about the exact moment my entire personality collapsed. I was standing in a Whole Foods cafeteria holding a seven dollar drink I did not plan to order, wearing yesterday’s jeans, and having what I can only describe as a full spiritual reckoning over a cup of matcha. The fluorescent lights were not flattering. The granola display next to me was overpriced. I did not care about either of these things because something had just happened to me and I was still figuring out what to call it.

I had been wrong. Loudly, confidently, aggressively wrong. For years.

This is that story. And before you click away thinking you do not care about matcha, you do. You just do not know it yet. I said the same thing. I said it for three years. I said it with the kind of certainty that only people who are completely, embarrassingly wrong ever really have.

· · ·

PART ONE: THE SMUG YEARS

I Watched the Trend.
I Judged the Trend.
I Was the Trend.

“I had standards. Or so I told myself. It took me three years and a Whole Foods to find out I was just afraid of being converted.”

I am not, historically, a joiner. I watched the sourdough era come and go. I survived the cloud bread moment with my dignity intact. I watched matcha detonate across every corner of the internet, the ceramic cups, the ceremonial grade powder, the girls with linen aprons and dewy skin and an unsettling amount of inner peace, and I stood there, arms crossed, completely unaffected.

I had standards. Or so I told myself.

A friend handed me a cup once. I took a sip. I smiled politely. I handed it back and internally filed it under things that are simply not for me, alongside hot yoga and natural wine and waking up before 7am for reasons that are not an emergency.

It tasted like a lawn. A nice lawn. A well maintained lawn belonging to someone with better health insurance than me and a linen closet that actually smells like linen. But still. A lawn.

I moved on. I did not look back. I did not miss it.

PART TWO: THE INCIDENT

What Happened in
the Whole Foods
Cafeteria.

I was not on a mission. I was not feeling adventurous or curious or open to life. I was thirsty and slightly irritable and standing in front of a menu board and something made me point at the matcha latte.

Double powder. Whole milk. Well blended. I do not know why. I will never know why. Perhaps the universe has a sense of humor. Perhaps three years of algorithmic exposure had quietly dissolved my defenses without my knowledge or consent. Perhaps I was simply thirsty enough that the part of my brain responsible for stubbornness had finally gone offline.

Not slowly. Not reluctantly. Immediately and completely and without any warning whatsoever.

I want to be honest with you about what it was like to be wrong about something for this long and then find out about it in a Whole Foods. It is humbling. It is slightly embarrassing. It is also, somehow, exactly the right place for it to happen.

And that was that. Done. Moving on.

“I stood my ground against millions of reels, an entire aesthetic movement, and the combined enthusiasm of what felt like every person I followed online. I was unbothered. I was resolved. I was wrong.”

· · ·

PART THREE · THE PART NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

It Was Never Really
About the Drink.

Here is the thing about being wrong for a long time about something.

It is never really about the thing.

When I think about the three years I spent dismissing matcha, I am not actually thinking about a drink. I am thinking about all the other things I have written off too quickly, too early, too confidently. The books I put down after ten pages. The cities I visited once and decided I understood. The people I met and quietly filed under not for me before I had any real information to go on.

We do this constantly. We meet someone and within minutes we have already decided who they are. We take one sip of a person, one conversation, one impression, one bad timing moment, and we hand the cup back and walk away. We are so convinced we are protecting ourselves. We are so convinced we know what we like. We are so convinced our first read is the accurate one.

It almost never is.

The people who have mattered most in my life were not obvious from the beginning. They did not arrive with fanfare. They did not immediately make sense. There was the friend I found deeply irritating for the first six months and now cannot imagine a single important moment without. There was the person who seemed too quiet, too slow, too careful, and turned out to be the one who showed up every single time, without being asked, without making it about themselves, without needing recognition for it. There was the one who felt like background noise for years and then one ordinary afternoon said one thing that rearranged something in me permanently.

None of them announced themselves. None of them tried to win me over.

They just kept showing up.

“The most extraordinary people I know did not make a strong first impression. They made a lasting one. And the difference between those two things is patience. Yours, not theirs.”

Some people operate quietly. Not because they have nothing to offer but because they have never needed the noise. They do not walk into a room and immediately claim it. They do not perform warmth or signal depth or make sure you notice how interesting they are. They simply exist, fully and without apology, doing what they do, being who they are, completely unbothered by whether or not you have figured them out yet.

These are the people worth knowing.

Not the ones who dazzle you immediately and leave you slightly confused about what just happened. Not the ones who are extraordinary in the first five minutes and ordinary in every minute after. The ones worth knowing are the ones who are the same at 2am on a bad Tuesday as they are at their most impressive moment in public. The ones who do not need you to see them to keep being exactly who they are.

They are an acquired taste. Completely, stubbornly, magnificently themselves.

And the people who never come back for a second sip miss them entirely.

· · ·

PART FOUR · THE AFTERMATH

Not Because They Changed.
Because You Finally Did.

This is what matcha taught me. Not about wellness or antioxidants or the superior nature of oat milk foam. About the danger of the permanent first impression. About how many things and how many people I have filed under not for me when what I actually meant was not yet, or not right now, or not when I was this distracted and this certain and this unwilling to be surprised.

The version of me that handed that cup back three years ago was not wrong because she did not like matcha. She was wrong because she decided, with complete confidence, that she never would.

That is the part worth examining.

Not the opinion. The permanence of it.

You do not fall for matcha. You grow into it. And in my experience, the same is almost always true of the things and the people that end up meaning the most. They are not the ones that knock you flat immediately with a grand gesture and a perfect first impression. They are the ones that are still there later, unchanged, unbothered, exactly themselves, when you finally slow down enough to actually pay attention.

They become a necessity. Not because they changed. Because you finally did.

“Some things do not announce themselves. They do not perform for you. They do not try to win you over. They just keep showing up in your peripheral vision until one ordinary afternoon, in an unremarkable place, you finally taste them properly and think,

oh. Oh, there you are.”

· · ·

The strawberry shortcake matcha from Blank Street is waiting for you.

Double powder. Oat milk. Foam on top.

I know you think it is not for you.

I thought that too.

Give it time. Or just go to Whole Foods on a random Tuesday afternoon.
Either way. It finds you eventually.

Subscribe now

Nobody rhapsodizes about the protein shake.

Nobody lingers at the bottom of the glass, swirling what’s left and getting sentimental. Nobody posts an Instagram story captioned “the shake really gets me.” You won’t find it on a chalkboard menu with an origin story. There are no ceramic mugs, no ritual, no community of people who carry tote bags professing their devotion to it.

And yet, statistically, more people are drinking protein shakes than are crying into their overpriced matcha lattes about their morning routine. The shake quietly feeds an entire population of builders. Gym people. Recovering people. Tired people. People trying to become something they are not yet.

It doesn’t taste like celebration. It tastes like effort.

That’s the whole point.

I have been thinking, as I always do with this series, about what this drink is really a metaphor for. And I think I’ve found it.

The protein shake is the person in your life who showed up when you were weak, stayed while you got stronger, and then quietly disappeared back into their own life, leaving only their impact behind.

Not the matcha friend. Not the coffee friend. Not the people who made your life taste better or feel more elevated.

The ones who came to strengthen your spine.

PART ONE · THE UNCELEBRATED CATEGORY

We Have No Word
For the People Who
Built Us.

“They entered your life during a construction phase, when you were mid renovation, the walls stripped bare, the wiring exposed. And they did not flinch.”

We have very romantic vocabulary for certain kinds of relationships. The mentor who changed everything. The soulmate. The ride or die. We write them into speeches and thank you notes and late night journal entries. We know their names by heart and we say them often and with feeling.

But there is a whole category of people we do not have a great word for.

They are not mentors in the formal sense. There was no title, no program, no certificate at the end. They are not best friends either. The bond was quieter, more functional, almost accidental. They are teachers sometimes. Colleagues sometimes. That one concierge at a hotel who handed you a book that rewired something in you. The gym buddy. The lab partner. The person who sat next to you on a train and said one thing that you still think about years later.

They entered your life during a construction phase. When you were mid renovation, the walls stripped bare, the wiring exposed. And they did not flinch. They just picked up a tool and got to work.

“They do not come to make your life more tasteful, easy, or joyful. They come to build the parts of you that were once weak. The parts that needed love, kindness, and a little more attention.”

Once the renovation is done, once you have moved back in and hung the pictures and started living in the newly built version of yourself, they are often gone. Not dramatically. Just quietly no longer present.

And you rarely mark that departure because you are too busy inhabiting the person they helped you become.

· · ·

PART TWO · THE GYM, THE FRIEND, THE FIRST SQUAT

Sometimes the Metaphor
is Obvious. It is
Still True.

I will stop being abstract now, because there is a specific person I have been thinking about since I poured this shake this morning.

I know. You saw it coming. The protein shake and the gym friend. Yes. Sometimes the metaphor lands exactly where you expect it to and it is still the truest thing in the room.

When I first walked into a gym, I was the specific kind of clueless that is also slightly terrifying. I did not know what the equipment was for. I did not know the unwritten rules. I did not know what a rep was, what a set was, what any of the numbers on the machines meant. I understood the gym the way you understand a foreign film without subtitles. Something is clearly happening, everyone else seems to follow it, and you are smiling and nodding and hoping no one notices you are completely lost.

My understanding of the real world at that point was, if I am being honest, equally twisted.

I was building a version of myself from scratch, which is a project that no one really hands you a blueprint for.

“He was the first person to hold my hand and take me through the process. Our bond was entirely platonic, which makes it all the more sacred. The only thing I offered him in return was my company. And somehow, that was enough for both of us.”

He was not strict in the punishing sense. He did not make me feel small for not knowing things. But he also would not let things slide.

There is a very particular skill in being the person who holds you accountable without making you feel like you are failing, and he had it completely. He would question my logic. Challenge the beliefs I had not thought to question. Not to tear them down, but to see which ones were actually load bearing and which ones were just old furniture I had never bothered to move.

He did not just make me do my first squat.

He made sure I understood why a wrong posture could wreck me.

He was teaching me durability, not just performance.

· · ·

PART THREE · WHAT THE SHAKE ACTUALLY TASTES LIKE

You Only Taste What
They Gave You
Years Later.

The thing about a protein shake is that it asks something of you every single time. It is not a passive pleasure. You have to decide to make it. You have to put the work in first, and then drink it after. It is a reward that only makes sense in the context of effort.

Drink it without the workout and it is just a somewhat chalky beverage with an identity crisis.

The people like my friend are exactly the same. Their value compounds. You do not fully taste what they gave you while they are giving it. You taste it six months later when you notice you are standing differently in a room. Two years later when you realize you have been holding your spine straight through situations that used to flatten you completely.

You do not dote over them. You do not post about them. You do not brag about them the way you might brag about a glamorous friendship or a wild night or a connection that looked good from the outside. But they live inside the stronger version of you, in the parts that were once soft and have since hardened into something worth keeping.

They stay in the parts of yourself that were once weak. The parts that needed love, kindness, and a little more attention. Long after they have gone, you move through the world on the foundation they helped you pour.

PART FOUR · THE UNCELEBRATED DESERVE A MOMENT

I Never Properly
Thanked Him. This Is
Me Trying.

I am writing this partly as a personal act of acknowledgment.

I do not think I ever properly thanked him. Not in a way that matched what he gave me. We drifted, as people do, both of us building different things in different directions. But I think about him in gyms. I think about him when I correct my form. I think about him when I realize I am asking myself the same questions he used to ask me.

He reintroduced me to my own potential. Quietly. Practically. Without ceremony.

And that is worth raising a glass to, even if the glass tastes like vanilla protein powder and optimism and the particular kind of gratitude that arrives too late to be delivered in person.

So here is to them. The builders. The holders of accountable. The people who arrived when you were under construction and left when you were standing. The ones who will not be in the documentary about your life but whose fingerprints are on every single room of who you have become.

They deserve their own category. They deserve a drink named after them.

I think we can all agree this one fits.

· · ·

“If this found you at the right moment, share it with someone who built you.

They probably do not know they did.”

· · ·

The shake is not glamorous.

Neither was what they did for you.

That was never the point.

Some people do not come to make your life more beautiful.
They come to make you more capable of living it.

Raise the glass. Even if nobody is watching.
Especially if nobody is watching.

Subscribe now

I want to be very clear about something before we begin: not drinking chai causes me genuine intestinal distress. My body decided this a long time ago. We have made peace. The chai stays.

That is the footnote. The real story is so much better.

Chai is a time portal. I am completely serious. One sip and I am back in a kitchen that smelled like cardamom and something faintly burnt and everything I did not yet know I would miss. I am that teenager again, sitting on the counter, legs dangling, watching my dad work at the stove like he was doing something completely unremarkable.

He was not doing something unremarkable. He was making chai. There is nothing unremarkable about that.

☕ ☕

A cricket match is running in the background. Always a cricket match. My dad watched cricket the way devoted people pray — with patience and absolute faith that if you just kept watching, something would eventually happen that justified all the waiting. I absorbed this from him without either of us realising it. The ability to sit still for something. To believe that presence itself is a form of love.

And somewhere in that same kitchen, my mother is delivering her standing lecture. She had data, I think, or at least very strong feelings presented with the confidence of data backed by Facebook. Chai is bad for you. No one in this house listens to her. We are all going to regret this.

We did not listen. We drank the chai.
We have zero regrets.

the part I don’t talk about

I still make two cups.

I do not know when the habit started or why it refuses to leave. I just know that every time I reach for the pot, my hands make enough for two people. The muscle memory does not care about what has changed. It only remembers what used to be.

The one who had no idea she was storing all of this up inside her. Who thought the kitchen counter was just a kitchen counter. Who did not know she would one day be sitting alone with a cup going cold beside her, missing people in the present tense.

And the extraordinary thing; the thing that keeps undoing me is that it stays. The memory does not fade the way memories usually do. Chai keeps everything alive inside me in a way nothing else has managed to. Every time I make it, the memory sharpens. They come back.

Every single time. Both of them. All of them.
Everyone the kitchen ever held.

the love that comes home to you

In every other piece I have written in this series, I relate the drink to the love I have for someone else. Each one maps onto a version of love I give outward — to other people, to other parts of my life.

Chai is different.

Chai is the love that has nowhere left to go but inward.

That is what the second cup taught me. That loving yourself is not always the triumphant thing we make it out to be on the internet. Sometimes it is not a glow up or a revelation or a morning routine. Sometimes it is just sitting with a cup that has gone cold and deciding, quietly, that you are still worth the warmth.

That you will make it again tomorrow. That you will keep showing up for yourself even when the other chair is empty.

Especially when the other chair is empty.

· · ·

But here is the thing nobody tells you about loving yourself this way. It is not loud. It is not a declaration you make once and frame on your wall. It is quiet and it is daily and it is made at 7 in the morning in a kitchen that is not the one you grew up in — with ingredients you carried across customs in your suitcase because you did not trust any store to have the right kind.

It is the choosing. Every single day, the choosing. To go back, even when it hurts a little. To hold the memory instead of setting it down somewhere safe where you cannot feel it. To let a drink do what no distance and no time and no new life has managed to undo.

To let it mean something.

My dad is older now. The cricket still plays.
My mother still lectures.

And somewhere in the steam of every cup I make,
that kitchen still exists.

It always will.

That is the thing about the places that made you.
They do not let go.
They just wait, warm and patient,
for you to find your way back.

END OF ISSUE NO. 03

Let me tell you something nobody’s brave enough to admit in their wellness era, their gut health glow up, their “I’ve switched to matcha”chapter:

Some of us are in a committed relationship with a silver can.
And we are not looking to break up.

It’s not a habit anymore. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with God. It’s an addiction. A full blown, no apologies, don’t you dare send me that aspartame article addiction.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you: it stopped being about taste somewhere around the third year. Now it’s about something far more embarrassing to explain at dinner parties.

The honest part.

I live far away from my family. Far away from everyone I have ever loved with the kind of love that leaves marks on you. The people whose voices I know in the dark, whose kitchens I could navigate blindfolded, who would notice within forty seconds if something was wrong with me.

Distance does a specific kind of damage that nobody photographs for Instagram. It doesn’t look like anything. You go to work. You make plans. You become very good at being fine.

Detachment, I’ve decided, is one of my superpowers. I wear it like a leather jacket. Cool, protective, a little tough on the outside. I can leave. I can adapt. I can build a whole new life in a new city with new people and make it look effortless.

But then.
THEN.
I crack open
a Diet Coke.

Because Diet Coke is the one thing that has never, not once, been complicated. It has never been in a different time zone. It has never been too busy to pick up. It has never needed space or asked me to communicate better or forgotten my birthday.

It is just there. Cold. Familiar.
That pssshhht — like a tiny carbonated exhale of relief.
Like the universe whispering: you made it through another one.

The price goes up.
We stay anyway.

Everything gets more expensive. The rent goes up. The flights home get longer and pricier. The therapy, the groceries, the cost of simply existing in a city that didn’t know your name until recently. Everything inflates except the loyalty.

It shows up in gas stations and corner stores and airports at 6am when I am running on two hours of sleep and a very fragile sense of self. It shows up in the minibar of hotel rooms in cities I visit for work, sitting there like a small gift, like the universe saying I thought you might need this.

A small confession.

Sometimes I open a can not because I’m thirsty. I open it because I need something to hold. Because there is comfort in the weight of a cold can in your palm. Because the ritual of it — the crack, the fizz, the first sip that hits the back of your throat — is the one thing in my day that is exactly the same as it was yesterday and will be exactly the same tomorrow.

When everything else is uncertain and shifting and requiring you to be brave in ways nobody warned you about —

that consistency
is not a small thing.
That consistency
is everything.

The part where I
pretend to have balance.

Will I cut back? Probably not.

Will I read the articles? I will open them, feel briefly afraid, and then close them and open a Diet Coke instead.

Will I switch to sparkling water with a slice of lemon like a person who has a skincare routine and goes to bed before midnight? Absolutely not. That is not who I am and we both knew that going in.

I will keep cracking one open somewhere over the Atlantic like a small private celebration that I am on my way back. I will keep holding it in my hands like it is telling me something important.

Because it is.

It is telling me that some things stay. That comfort can be simple. That you don’t always have to earn the thing that makes you feel okay.

Sometimes it just costs two dollars at a bodega.
And it is enough.

It is more than enough.

Every time I drink any sort of beverage dipped in caffeine, I will put on a writing piece and guess what I would name those chapters after? That’s right, the drink I am having.

So, let me think. What does this iced halva latte taste like?

It tastes like a random Tuesday afternoon by the window of a café with no wifi, scrambling on some random word doc and listening to retro Spanish music blasting in the background.

The drink is not too sweet, not too bitter. Just how that one love felt like that one July afternoon. The first sip enters your system slowly and almost so swiftly that you forget to put your guards back up.

It doesn’t announce its arrival. It blends in so smoothly, like oat milk stirred into an iced drink, that you forget it was one of the best drinks you have ever had. Especially on the day you were alone and all you needed was a voice of affirmation, a pair of eyes to look into yours and tell you that it will be alright, a location shared on a text message without even knowing each other’s last names.

Halva is one of my favorite Indian desserts and this drink tastes nothing like it. And maybe that’s the best part about it. You think you are getting to one thing and maybe you have figured out an aspect already and turns out you were misguided all along in the most humorous way ever. You think you are getting close to the truth and realize you were just projecting the taste you were already familiar with onto a foreign drink you had never come across, probably ever again.

What is more heartbreaking? The fact that I will never want to order this drink again from the menu or the disappointment I faced after learning that it wasn’t the drink that didn’t live up to my taste but my own expectations that were far away from the reality that was presented to me?

Okay. Drowning in the last sip of this drink and the only thing I can think of is how I would never want to come back here again, not for this drink at least. How I would never miss it when I go back home. How I would never look for it in other places, hoping it would taste better if somebody else made it.

But somehow a part of it will always consume my memory, because unlike all the other good matchas I have had, so many so that I have lost count, this drink was definitely not my type and not something I would like to try again. But also something that wasn’t just another iced coffee I sipped, because it definitely left a taste in my mouth.

next sip coming soon