Two Cups of Iced Espresso

Almost all caffeinated drinks have a shot of espresso in them. These are my favorite to drink and to make. A single shot wakes your body and a double one wakes your soul. Some of these drinks are also made with milk. For the cappuccino, milk takes the form of foam and for the latte, it is used to draw those leaves or hearts on top.

It had been a month since I started working as a barista on my work and travel program in America. I already knew most of the specifics in my job. How to flatten the right amount of espresso in the portafilter. When exactly to stop the steamer so I don’t make everything around me with milk, as it boils over. A whole bunch of wrongly made drinks was behind me. I was confident in my job, yet I was about to embarrass myself with one of the easiest drinks to make.

During one of my not so busy evening shifts, at the coffee shop came the customer, that would ruin my self-esteem. He was a guy, around my age and he was obviously undergoing chemotherapy, but he had a radiant smile on his face and warm blue eyes. He greeted me politely and sincerely asked me how my day has been. I responded to that question with “I am great, how are you?” in my exalted customer service voice and proceeded to make his drink.

He wanted four shots of espresso over ice, to which order I served two cups with two shots each. My colleague saw my mistake and hurried to correct me and make the right drink. The guy just laughed at this confusion and said that he would take the two cups. For a moment I just stood there blinking and staring into space. I blamed my mistake on the tiredness of working two jobs. However, what I didn’t want to admit was that there was something intimidating in him, which had made me feel completely out of place.

Then he started visiting the coffee place every week and he always teased me of this first disaster, which I had served him. I didn’t make more mistakes, though I noticed myself of getting a little clumsier around him. We started chatting more and developed a nice flirtationship. It was the kind of relationship where you are more than admiring each other’s presence, yet not acting brazenly.

I remember how he used to sit in the café, read his Murakami’s novel, and from time to time lift his head to look at me behind the counter. The tension between us was growing and one day he asked me on a date, to which offer I mumbled something like a “No”. I didn’t want to insult him and mess our friendship, while at the same time I was filled with prejudice and concerns about his condition. Nothing like this had happened to me before. I have always been good at cutting off too generous offers of promising gentlemen. But this guy was different and yet extremely positive, despite what he might have been going through. It was hard to admit that this was what had grabbed my attention in the first place. The biggest reason for my confusion, however, which I hadn’t shared with him, remained the fact that I was having somebody, back in my country.

One day, while he was sitting at the coffee place, reading and having his usual iced four-shot espresso, I decided to put an end to the guilt, that I had gathered. I hopped out of the counter and went straight to his table. I stood there like on a battlefield, armed with an apron and a head bandage. I was explaining myself, while wielding a piece of rag in my hand like a sword. When I finished, he looked me with the same smile like on that first day when I served him the two cups of espresso and we both started laughing. We silently agreed on being friends and we have remained such until today.

This is how I realized that some people are meant to be in your life in one way or another. Sometimes there exists this connection that does not need a label or definition. As one of my favorite quotes of Oscar Wilde says, “to define is to limit”. In my case, an iced espresso is what dragged me to this indefinable connection. This friendship was soaked with freedom, laughter, sun rays and on day-offs salty water and sand in my shoes.

Now as I am back in my country and the seasons have changed, I am trying to bring these summer memories of freedom back. Sometimes when I am having an espresso somewhere, I order it in a cup of ice, exactly how he used to drink it. And as Ray Bradbury writes in his novel “Dandelion Wine” this iced espresso for me means to “Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in,”.

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Sofia Drenkova studies Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Bulgaria. Sofia enjoys reading novels and having a cup of double-shot iced espresso.

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