Some mornings begin with silence.
Others begin with noise you can’t hear—
A hum behind the eyes, a tremble in the fingertips, a feeling like your thoughts are being chased by invisible dogs.
That’s caffeine.
Not the romantic kind. Not the kind Hemingway sipped in a Paris café while thinking about lost wars and simpler sins.
No, this is the sharp-edged kind.
The kind that disguises itself as ambition.
That tells you:
Go faster. Work harder. More. Now.
I used to think coffee made me sharper.
More precise. Like I could cut through the fog of the day with a well-caffeinated blade.
But lately, it just makes everything… too loud.
I answer one email and forget the point of the next.
I write a sentence and rewrite it five times.
I start a task, and thirty seconds later I’m checking the weather in a country I’ve never been to.
I remember once, in 2017, I was living in a small apartment near Shinozaki station. The walls were the color of old paper. The window looked out onto a laundromat and a crooked persimmon tree.
I drank three cups of coffee that morning. Not out of desire, but out of ritual.
And by 10:04 a.m., I was spiraling.
I remember trying to write a short story.
It started with a man sitting on a bench.
By paragraph two, he was already divorced.
By paragraph five, he’d joined a cult in Hokkaido.
I don’t know if the story was good. I never finished it.
Instead, I vacuumed the floor three times, alphabetized my tea collection, and googled “how to know if you’re too awake.”
At 2 p.m., I found myself in a FamilyMart buying melon bread and staring at the instant noodles like they might whisper the answer back.
I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t lazy.
I was just vibrating at a frequency that didn’t match the world.
That’s the thing about caffeine.
It doesn’t always speed you up.
Sometimes, it just pulls you apart.
Like your soul is racing ahead of your body,
And your brain is somewhere on the highway shoulders,
Trying to hitch a ride back home.
So today, I skipped the third cup.
I made hojicha instead. Watched the steam curl like a ghost in reverse.
And let the silence spread out across the room like a soft rug.
I wrote slower. But better.
I stared out the window for five full minutes.
I remembered something someone told me once in Kyoto—
That focus isn’t about attention.
It’s about returning.
Returning to the moment.
To the sentence.
To yourself.
If you’re reading this with three half-drunk coffees on your desk and thirteen tabs open:
Breathe.
Not everything urgent is important.
And not everything important moves quickly.
You don’t have to match the speed of the noise.
Let it pass.
Write your story at the pace it asks for.
Even if it begins with a man on a bench,
And never ends at all.
life 