“Once, a long time ago:

“I hate tea.” I make a face after a sip of the ghastly murk swimming around in her cup. “I can’t imagine why you drink the stuff.”

We’re in a cafe, one of our favourite ones, with big wide windows that allow the sun to spread out across every surface in the place. The varnish on the old wooden furniture, each piece with entire histories written across its grain, doesn’t just glow. It shines.

“I love tea.” she says, small fingers around the handle, pulling her drink back to herself from across the table. She flips her magazine shut. Old men sit at the counter, faces wrinkling as they talk with each other in low voices; customers fill their silences with closed eyes: Rickie Lee Jones on the radio, the sound of her voice so old and so young, as if she had seen too much and forgot too little.

“So I’ve heard. I still can’t figure out why.”

“It’s smooth. Delicate. Like dew on grass.”

“What it is, my dear, is that tea is a drink for invalids. You don’t drink it. You nurse it. Like a cold.”

“Here, now –” she protests, but I cut her off.

“– Coffee. Now that is a real drink. Something you can really savour –”

“Savour? Nonsense,” she rolls her eyes at me. “You guzzle it by the pot, you hopeless addict.”

I wave away her groundless accusations. “No, no. Coffee is something I partake. Not guzzle. Coffee arabica, shade-grown, roasted and then brewed to perfection. Fine art in liquid form.”

“But tea is synonymous with civility. And tea predates coffee by almost four thousand years. A Chinese emperor discovered it.”

“Now now, you can’t possibly believe every fairy tale you come across just because it suits you.”

She ignores my  little quip and continues undaunted: “Whereas the first cup of ‘joe’ was discovered by an African goatherder. You know what that is? No lovely handmaidens. No finely-woven robes. Goatherder. Herder of smelly, braying goats. So — if we’re being accurate here — coffee was a peasant’s drink.”

I pause, and then say, “Now, surely you know that it is donkeys that bray. Goats bleat.” I grin.

She looks at me testily, scowling, knuckles whitening on her scrunched-up magazine.

And that’s how we would bicker and banter. Always have. Like silly little things who have nothing ahead of them, nothing more important, with all their lives to live, days and years stretched out before them like a promise. Listening to Saturday Afternoons in 1963, talking witless talk about tea and coffee, knowing we would still saunter out the doors hand in hand at the end of it, spilling out onto the sidewalk like sunlight.

But I had never imagined it to be like this. Like today. Like now, when my heart is pulled across the room like a translucent sheet of white paper, punched clean through the middle. It’s a hole, a great big tear, and you can see right through it to the empty chair where you used to sit.

“Stupid woman,” I say out loud. But there’s no one else to hear it. “Why did you have to leave.” It’s not a question. It’s not. Especially when the answer’s written all over the empty house.

Stupid woman. Don’t you know that love is a whole life, like what that writer said? They never talk about what’s after. They talk about the sunlight. The voice of an old young woman over the radio. The little worlds we conceive in our heads and the tiny shelves where we put our hearts. But never about what’s after.

What’s after is this: It’s an empty space where you used to be. It’s the dusted brick of tea lying untouched in the kitchen cabinet. It’s the foolish grin tucked away under my face. It’s ordering one coffee and nothing else. It’s your face, your skin, your hair, your smile. Each living on and on, through a hundred Saturdays, but only on the inside of me.”

- ‘2: What’s After’, from Thirteen 2 Thirteen

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Listen with Aimee Mann’s It’s Not

Rickie Lee Jones – On Saturday Afternoons in 1963