There are things lying on the crosswalk that shouldn't have been left there. A plastic comb with three broken teeth, a crumpled receipt whose ink has faded into a ghost of numbers, a glove without a partner, a key without a lock. They're not there by chance—nor by design. They're the remnants of actions that once had meaning, now stuck between two sidewalks. Things that no longer know where they came from, let alone where they're supposed to go. The wind sometimes shifts them a few inches, as if trying to give them a direction, but even the wind has no plan. The comb scrapes briefly against the asphalt, the receipt flutters like a nervous butterfly, and then comes a moment of complete stillness. The sun burns a white line down the middle of the road. No one crosses. The world holds its breath for a moment for this mess that no longer forms a story.
Interval.
Between the first tempting sip and the moment when the bitter, lukewarm dregs quietly settle in a forgotten cup on a desk covered in half-finished thoughts and papers that whisper of better times, there unfolds the timeless, melancholic interval that begs for an alarm—a rhythmic, almost poetic reminder of attention, of presence, of the moment when coffee still carries warmth and intention is still intact. For it is not just any interval, not the aimless ticking of a clock in the background of a Zoom call that no one is really following; it is a fragile, breathing organism of time, in which the mind wanders from warmth to tasks, from smell to spreadsheet, from the buzz of now to the deferral of pleasure. Every sip that is missed is a lost opportunity for solace, for focus, for that small ritual that separates the human from the soulless machine—a sip not merely as hydration but as an act of self-affirmation: “I am here, I am drinking, I am.”
