I hate the smell of coffee. A fiction entry.

I know I am not crazy, I know I shouldn’t sue Starbucks, I know I could just try again, I know, I know… I know I shouldn’t hate the smell of coffee but… I know every time the repulsive smell of coffee approaches to my nose I just want to puke, to poop, to cry… to scream.

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Being a 20 years old student in London can lead you to lots of stuff, mostly if you are a foreigner and you live in a warehouse in Shoreditch with 4 artists (ketamine addicts). I’m not saying that doing drugs is right or wrong, or that all my paranoia comes from there, I’m just talking about the circumstances, I’m talking about the tube, the bus, even about the cleaning products: I’m skint.

I cannot recall any time since I moved here when I could say that I had enough money to live a proper comfy life; I’ve been living in the shadows of ‘can you lend me 20 quid mate?’, in the soho flayerer drunk state , and now finally in the Starbuck’s hall of shame. Wicked! Got finally a kind of proper decent job where people don’t ask me if I sell coke, where I don’t stay until 3am in the cold pretending that I love the event I’m promoting, where I don’t have to explain directions, where I don’t even have to talk! Brilliant, where shall I sign?

I never truly loved Starbucks to be perfectly fair, I remember back home my friends coming from the States saying things like: wow! There is this really amazing coffee shop called Starbucks! I would respond like: oh really? No coffee can beat the one my mom drinks every morning; black Colombian coffee at 7am, “con-leche” at 9. It’s incredible how her world seemed to fall apart those days when coffee was regulated by the government so she couldn’t find it anywhere. Dear Chavez, just give their coffee to your people, they need it more than your words, thanks.

Starbucks was, anyways, a new thing for me, from the Christmas red cups fever to the ginger scented macchiato. However job was easy, I would make coffees like a robot by inertia.
I’ve never been a fan of coffee; I sold my soul to English, chai, red bush, liquorice, green and red chili teas 3 years ago when I first came to the UK. However my job was 100% coffee related. I was working at the very small and busy Starbucks in Camden, and I loved the view to the canal, sometimes I would go outside for a fag and see the sunset and all the lovely pseudo-freaks crossing the bridge up and down, up and down, and then below the bridge I would occasionally see the occasionally skunk smoker with long dreadlocks and big headphones listening to dubstep, maybe or some jungle, perhaps.

Certain sunny summer day the manager told all the staff that the shop would be closed in order to deep clean all the machinery, I thought that they hired specialists to do this but I guess I was wrong, and it makes sense after all, “special bonus benefits” they call it.
I was assigned to change the coffee filters of the espresso machine, some colleague explained me how to do it so I started. At this point of the story I don’t know if keep telling you or just give up and tell you “never mind, I can’t remember”, lie to you, in your face, just not to have this image inside my head again, ever: a dead rat! *runs to the toilet*