The Tea Goes Cold

by Hawenayo

​

I sit at the kitchen table
with a cup of tea I keep forgetting to drink.
It cools faster than I expect,
a thin skin forming,
the morning moving past me
as if I weren’t here at all.

 

I didn’t sleep.
Not really.
I lay there, turning from side to side,
counting the sounds of the house,
the fridge humming a distant, hollow tune,
the water pipes groaning somewhere deep in the walls,
a faint buzz from the streetlamp drifting through the curtains,
my own breath, unfamiliar,
as if it belonged to someone else
trying to survive inside my chest.

 

Morning comes anyway.
It always does.
Even when I feel unfinished.
Even when my body hasn’t agreed
to be a body yet.

 

The tiredness doesn’t lift.
It settles deeper,
turning my own presence
into something I have to haul—
the gravity of the room tugging at my skin.

 

I’m too tired to inhabit my own name,
too tired to hold my thoughts in order,
too tired to explain why I look fine
but feel like I’m fading from the inside.

 

The kettle boils.
I pour the water.
I wait, my hands busy with nothing,

my mind dragging itself through the air.

I wait,

like the waiting itself is the task.

 

I tell myself this is normal.
The sentence stops there.
Everything else arrives in fragments—
the cup cooling,
my hands still,
the sense that I was meant to do something
before forgetting what it was.

 

There’s effort now—
the quiet labour
of deciding what comes next,
the small pause between one action
and remembering why I stood up.

I stay there a moment, unclaimed by anything,
lingering long enough
for the thought to slip away again.

 

By night, I’ll return to bed
with the same quiet hope
that sleep might recognise me this time.

Most nights, it doesn’t.
It circles.
It stays just out of reach.
I twist the sheets into knots,
my thoughts folding back on themselves,
the dark thick with questions
that don’t want answers.

 

And then—
light again.
Another morning.
Another chair pulled out.
Another cup warming my hands.
Another attempt.
While the rest of me lags behind.

 

I’m not looking for meaning here.
I’m not turning this into a lesson.
This is just what it looks like
to live inside a body that falters,
to keep showing up at the table
even when I don’t feel present enough
to belong to the day.

 

The tea eventually goes cold.
I drink it anyway.
Because I’m here.
Because the morning insists.

Because somehow,
nothing has lifted,
I haven’t caught my breath,
and I’m still waiting—
for the day to begin,
for myself to arrive,
for something to loosen its grip
without asking me to be grateful for the ache.

© 2025 Hawenayo