Tea Stains
08/26/19
Monday morning finds us on the floor. Annika and I’s only companions are the three cups resting alongside us, small pools of tea cradling limp bags. Our door is freshly shut, leaving my roommate and I alone among the echoes of what has been said. I glance at my phone: 12 a.m. My second week of classes will just have to get used to seeing me in hoodies. I push my body up from the carpet and start getting ready for bed, but my unenthusiastic preparations are interrupted by a voice as eager as though the sky outside were turning gold instead of gray.
“Did you know,” Annika asks, “that tea bags stick to the wall if you throw them?”
I turn around in time to see that she isn’t going to wait for an answer. The abandoned third cup is now empty, and right before my aching eyes, Annika sends the spent bag to smack against the off-white wall above our sink. She’s right. It does stick. Ten minutes and five teabags later, bedtime and burdens forgotten, we’re gasping for air and wiping tears from our grinning cheeks. I say, “Let’s take them down in the morning.”
09/15/19
We don’t take them down in the morning. When September comes, it replaces our broken sink but leaves the remains of our afternoon rooibos. Girls come in and out of our room, and it always seems that either Annika or I are preparing to make a cup when they do. We seat them on our beds, pour some oolong, black, or herbal, and, when they exclaim over our wall, show them how to get their finished teabags to stick to the plaster. Our floormates tell us about their lives, and we do our best to tell them about ours.
“How are you doing, Rachel?” they ask. I swallow my tea, numb my pride, and force my eyes to meet theirs as I reply, “Not well.” I try to bring myself to say more, try to talk about my grief without letting the memories that curdle at the bottom of my cup tip over the edge. Most of the time, I can tell that the girls don’t grasp what my words almost say. But the notes slipped under our door, the whispered midnight greetings, and the quick responses in the group chat show that although the girls don’t understand, they do notice. We make them tea, and they make us smile.
10/27/19
My birthday comes and goes, anointing me with an adulthood that sits awkwardly on my shoulders. The weather has overwhelmed the bright-orange autumn afternoons for at least a week, and the days are becoming too short to generate warmth, like a sweater that no longer fits. I reach for the kettle as I hang up the phone. The water from the tap is slow to heat, and as I wait, my mind fills with the conversation I’ve just finished, if it could deserve such a generous term. I had finally turned for comfort to those I trusted most, but the spaces between my trembling confessions had been left empty, and only static had given answer to my hoarse pleas.
My brothers’ silence is still hissing in my head as I watch the bag of jasmine flinch from the steam. My mind churns with the agitation of my thoughts, and when I raise the cup to my mouth, my lips recoil. It seems I can’t even make a simple cup of tea these days. The delicate flowers will go from sweet to acerbic in a matter of minutes, and this tea was left far too long. I drink it anyway. Standing, I drift to the sink, letting my fingers blister as I reach into the near-boiling water. My brown skin blurs red as I hurl the bag against the wall. It breaks.
08/09/20
The tea bag fell apart, but I did not. A year has passed, but a stain can still be seen in the place that Annika and I decorated with the remains of what must have been hundreds of cups of tea. There had been many more brown bruises on that plaster, but they are gone now; only our hands, pink from scrubbing, gave testimony to their existence. Tea stains are known to linger for decades, but ours had been bleached off. Only one small spot remains to remind us of the time when we threw our discarded bags at the wall.
In those three months of our lives, boiling water had been poured over our souls. The dead leaves in our hearts had been forced to yield their flavor, blooming under the heat, bleeding reds and browns into the steaming liquid until they were left limp and obedient in the cup.
Every day felt like hitting a wall and bursting open, yet there was a matching name and face for every dangling string hanging from our wall. The little we had to offer had been received sometimes by friends and sometimes by strangers, but always by family. God’s grace had been seen in every drop and tasted in every sip as He slipped comfort into our lonely hands. Each clinging bag was a reminder that not once during that time had we ever been alone.