Caffeine

Coffee is not your friend, dearheart. I am trying to make it my buddy, but it seems that it is not being friendly. It tastes funny, it's bitterness runs all over my tongue and zaps the back of my throat. I want it to be sweet like its caramel-chocolate color that is always so inviting. It is like vanilla extract, it seems like it should be tasty, but then in shrivels up in your mouth like a dead leaf.

Caffeine is absorbed into my veins, giving my forearms a strange, otherworldly feeling that seems to disconnect them from my elbows. My brain is moving quickly, but not getting anywhere. It sweats on the treadmill of broken concentration, waiting to slip off the track into utter chaos.

It is a chemical that my body loves, just like all the other chemicals. It loves whatever foreign particles I can ingest.
Steroids left me so hyper I thought my skin might shake loose from the bustling molecules underneath.
Herbal relaxer numbed my brain so that every sentence trailed off into confusion.
Antibiotics turned my frown upside-down.
BCP keeps the OBGYN away.
Aspirin kicked the ache.
Caffeine makes my heart palpitate, makes my body live separately from my brain.
Strange.

My body likes drugs. Drugs like my body.

Does that make me an addict?
Does that make me healthy?

I have not acquired the taste for coffee. I'm trying. I want to fit in like all those cool coffee-house cats. I want to ask for dates by suggesting a casual cup a joe. (They don't like the suggestion when I end up drinking cocoa) I want to understand the addiction. I want to understand the flavor. I want to speak the lingo while I dive into pretentious poetry.

I want to be cool. If cool were a drug, I would have already had it.