On the Human Condition
Reflections with Your Cup of Coffee
Morning never arrives all at once.
It unfurls — slow, deliberate, like a soft-spoken omen.
The first blade of sunlight slips through the old windowpane, splitting the dust into tiny dancing embers. They drift and swirl in the quiet of my room like a small universe deciding whether or not to be born. My hair, wild and leonine from sleep, falls over my shoulder in loose waves, catching the light like it has secrets of its own.
The 100-year-old yellow pine floor creaks beneath my bare feet as I begin my daily pilgrimage downstairs. Each groan of the wood feels like a whispered greeting from the past — an acknowledgment that I am not the first woman to cross this threshold barefoot, half-dreaming, searching for warmth.
In the kitchen, I begin the small ritual that steadies me.
Coffee — dark and honest — waits in the bottom of my favorite chipped mug. I pour the creamer slowly, letting it billow outward in cloudy spirals. For a moment, it looks like a storm forming in a midnight sea, and then — silk. Softness conquering bitterness. A small alchemy, but an alchemy nonetheless.
I carry it to the couch, settling into my usual place, legs folded beneath the thin cling of lace and silk. Steam curls upward in pale ribbons, unfurling into the chill of morning like a ghost trying to remember its own name.
And it is here — always here — that memory ambushes me.
The First Spark
I think of how we meet people.
How the soul recognizes some faces with the ancient ache of déjà vu, an ache older than reason, older than the body itself.
We call it limerence because we are afraid to call it what it truly is:
the soul leaping out of its cage in recognition of another flame.
In those early moments, everything feels like a revelation.
I learned how you like your coffee, how you appreciate its purity, how you read alongside those first sips. These are the tiny, sacred details humans collect like charms on a string, proof that we are seen, and that we are seeing back.
We learn the tilt of each other’s voice, the half-smile, the hidden laugh, the tiny rituals no one else notices. And for a breathless moment, it feels like magic — because it is.
Connection is always magic.
But the morning never stays morning.
The Betrayal of Our Own Nature
For all our tenderness, for all our poetry, for all our glittering rituals of affection, we are creatures with teeth.
The same species that can marvel at the gentleness of a dust mote in morning light can, with the next exhale, commit casual cruelty without hesitation.
One day we say, “Be gentle with the world; it is fragile.” And the next, we ghost someone who cared for us, or tell a lie to spare ourselves discomfort,
or slip something from another’s pocket, assuming they won’t notice.
We speak of compassion while sharpening our silent knives.
We preach honesty, yet hide behind silence when the truth would cost us even an ounce of vulnerability.
We promise presence, yet vanish the moment someone’s need outgrows our convenience.
Humans are walking contradictions —
beautiful, brutal, brilliant contradictions.
The Underground in Us All
There is a place inside each of us that Dostoevsky understood too well:
the Underground.
That murky chamber where fear whispers sweetly, where conditioning hardens into instinct, where trauma teaches the tongue to say “No” to love and “Yes” to sabotage.
The Underground is the birthplace of the block button.
The cold shoulder, the silent exit, the strange cruelty we justify in the name of “self-protection.”
We do not hurt others because we are monsters.
We hurt them because we are frightened, unfinished animals —
creatures striving desperately to survive our own depths.
We are made of longing and panic, intuition and ego —
soul and shadow.
This is the human condition:
to be capable of exquisite tenderness in the morning light,
and capable of astonishing cruelty by nightfall.
The Terrible Beauty of It All
If these words break you open, good.
It means your heart is still awake.
Because this is the truth we try to avoid:
We love with holy fire —
and then vanish like smoke.
We cherish the tiny details —
and then abandon the entire story.
We build rituals around each other —
and then refuse the responsibility of being known.
Humans are not consistent,
but we are honest in our contradictions.
And somewhere between the steam curling from my coffee mug
and the ache that spreads through my chest when I think of what we do to one another, I realize this:
We are all simply trying to find our way back to ourselves —
one moment tender,
one moment terrified,
one moment shining like dawn.
We are both the cream swirling gently into the dark,
and the hand that sets the cup down too hard.
This is the human condition:
a storm and a prayer,
a wound and a wonder,
a cruelty and a kindness
forever at war beneath the same skin.
And still, somehow —
We rise each morning
and try again.