Coffee, anyone?

I'm not sure if I just fell off the wagon, or not.

If I did, I hopped.

Just not sure how to characterize the decision, which was quite deliberately aforethought, to put a scoop of real caffeinated coffee powder in the mug with my normal sugar&caffeine-free powdered drink.

De-caffeinated is the New-normal, since (gets out calendar to check)...oh, geeze, since January 23rd. I didn't realize it had been that long -- I was thinking it was March.

So now, an hour after beginning to slurp the verboten substance, my eyelids are flicking open at regular speed, instead of sticking shut and then slowly floating up to only halfway open again. On a morning when I found out a co-worker friend died yesterday (after a long illness, as they say), I...couldn't stand feeling that way...realized I had a great excuse for succumbing...said to hell with it and had an f-ing cup of real coffee, so screw you.

Realizing (in real time) why writing about learning of someone's death is so often packed with cliched phrases. You look inward, and try to put words to your inner state, and what comes out are cliches. 'Cuz this is what it feels like / everyone feels this way in these moments / grief is ineffable / words fail.

He was my friend, though I only saw him at work. He was a really good guy. He wasn't fifty yet.

I miss his presence in the office, but that's been true since he got his pancreatic cancer diagnosis last spring and took a week off of work before his (borderline emergency) surgery. He had a Whipple Procedure; which came up in a rerun of "Scrubs" this winter, a throw-away detail in a storyline about competitive surgeons.

I never visited his house, but he showed me pictures of his kitchen remodeling project. He finished it six months or so before he got sick.

He was an amateur photographer. He was deeply involved in his (unknown denomination) Christian church; guys from his church family visited him often during his hospital stays -- I met four of them the second-to-last time I saw him. I got that good-people vibe from them, too. They obviously cared about him deeply.

He's been gone from my daily life in the office for a bit more than a year, but now he's gone from everyone's daily life, everywhere.

It just is what it is. And it's only a little harder to put my feelings into words as it is to actually figure out what I'm feeling.