Cold Tea

I make tea when my hands need tasks.

Kettle, bag, pour, wait—easy choreography for a brain that sprints indoors.

The mug—chipped rim, familiar weight.

It was my mom’s; she said a chipped cup is lucky—already done with breaking.

I don’t believe it; I like the idea—disaster finished by choice.

Tonight: 9:47 p.m.—tea means avoidance.

The apartment is quiet; the radiator is dramatic; silence holds the rest. I drop the bag, watch the color bloom, and breathe the steam like that does anything.

“Hey,” the tea says. “We should talk.”

I don’t drop the mug. Not anymore. The first time I did. The second time, I sloshed it. Now I just roll my eyes like a person whose beverage has an opinion.

“Not now,” I tell it. “Long day.”

“Exactly,” the tea says. “Plenty to discuss.”

The voice isn’t a voice. It’s the small sound tea makes when it settles, added to words my head supplies. But the first time it happened, the words were not mine. They were hers. Same tilt, same little smile-tucked-in tone.

You know how a song can drag a room out of your chest? It was like that. Except it wasn’t a chorus; it was a conversation we never finished.

Tonight, the tea doesn’t sound like her. I've been acting like I'm okay for far too long because it sounds like my brother.

“What’s up?” "I say," sitting at the table. I don’t touch the mug. If you touch it, the tea warms and gets polite. If you let it cool, it grows brave.

“You sent a thumbs-up,” the tea says, in my brother’s voice, cheerful and wounded. “To a paragraph.”

He had asked if I wanted to go through Mom’s boxes with him this weekend. I typed sure and then replaced it with 👍 because I didn’t trust any words to sit still.

“Thumbs-up is universal,” I say.

“For surrender,” the tea says. “Why are you surrendering?”

“Because she labeled everything weird,” I say. “Because you’ll tell that story about her mixing up sugar and salt again, and I’ll laugh, and you’ll look pleased, like that’s what I’m for.”

Silence. Steam thins.

“That’s… fair,” the tea says. Not my brother’s words, but the way he might have said them if we didn’t keep playing assigned roles.

I hate and love this part. The tea doesn’t haunt; it hosts. If I let it go cold enough, it will serve whoever I’m not talking to like a medium with better manners. If I compromise and sip, it’ll offer my own voice back until I’m honest or bored.

“Are we really doing this?” I ask.

“We are,” the tea says. “Or, you know, you can scroll and pretend you didn’t boil me.”

I wrap my hands around the mug to make it stop being bold. The heat softens the edge of the conversation until it’s just me again, talking to me.

Fine. Cards up.

“I do not want to be the only one who remembers everything,” I say. “There. That’s the real sentence.”

The radiator sighs like it’s been waiting to exhale. Outside, somebody’s dog coughs. The apartment settles into listening.

“You think he doesn’t?” The tea asks, now in my own voice, which is somehow worse. “You think you’ve cornered the market on keeping?”

“I think I learned it first,” I say. “You were away at college when Dad got sick. I ran logistics. I’m good at archives and casseroles.”

“So let him bring jokes,” the tea says. “Let him think memory is a party trick. You don’t both have to carry the whole table.”

“I know,” I say, instantly defensive, immediately tired.

The tea cools again. Brave time.

“You’re angry he moved faster,” it says, back in my brother’s voice. “You’re angry the house emptied into his garage before you decided which mugs should hold what kind of grief.”

I want to argue, but the kettle is a witness.

“I’m angry we don’t talk like we did,” I say. “Like we were kids. Before everything had footnotes. Before every question came with a bill.”

The tea hums. It doesn’t judge; it hums. Music of exactly the frequency of not lying.

“What if you texted me,” it says, “and said, ‘I want to do three boxes with you on Sunday and then eat something Mom would hate’?”

“Like the time she said sushi is bait.”

“Exactly.”

I sip. The tea is cooler now, almost right. Cheap chamomile; childhood.

A taste you reach for when you’re practicing calm instead of feeling it—the drink that keeps your hands still while your heart argues.

“OK,” I say. “I’ll write that.”

“Now,” the tea says.

“Bossy.”

“Temperature’s dropping.”

I type the message. He replies before the typing dots can make me nervous. Three boxes. And we’re ordering the bait.

I laugh, alone, which is a kind of together.

The conversation doesn’t die, though. It shifts, like a tired friend adjusting on the couch.

“You want to talk about her next,” the tea says, and it doesn’t mean Mom. It means her—the woman I used to wake up beside when mornings were something to rush.

“No,” I say. “Yes.”

“Start small,” the tea suggests. “Start with the mug.”

“It’s chipped.”

“And you kept it.”

“She left. She took the plants and the good knives. She left the mug.”

“You took the mug,” the tea corrects. “You packed it like contraband in a hoodie pocket and told yourself it was just a cup.”

I tilt the mug so the chip catches light. It looks like a crescent moon. Or a bite mark.

“She called earlier,” I admit. “Unknown number. I didn’t answer.”

“Why?”

“Because if she wanted to talk, she’d… call.”

The tea waits.

“She did call,” it says.

“Shut up,” I say to the cup that is me.

Steam fades. A draft sneaks under the window like gossip. The tea cools to that specific hush where it becomes the truest version of the thing it’s pretending to be.

“OK,” I say. “OK.”

I call back. It goes to voicemail. Her voice is a room I know too well.

“Hey,” I say, when it beeps. “I have your mug. You probably don’t care, but I thought you should know it’s busy being a therapist. Also, I’m sorry I kept asking you to feel things at my speed.”

I hang up. The tea actually applauds. Tiny pats of heat against my palms.

“You’re insufferable,” I tell it.

“Correct,” the tea says, pleased. “More?”

“Not tonight.”

We sit there, me and the cup, the apartment doing its little winter noises. It’s late. The tea goes cold. The conversation thins to a companionable almost-silence.

Tomorrow, I’ll bring the mug to my brother’s. We’ll open boxes and argue about labels and order bait. Maybe I’ll leave the mug on his counter. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll keep boiling water and having helpful delusions until they become habits that don’t need magic.

Cup rinsed; upside down to dry.

Before bed, I set it on the rack—one small rock, like a coin choosing its face—then it settles.

“Same time tomorrow?” The tea asks from nowhere, from me, from the empty air that keeps a ledger.

“Maybe,” I say.

It’s not a promise. It’s close enough.