James Berman reflects on life in prison and how a simple cup of coffee becomes a source of comfort, friendship, memory, and hope for freedom.

The first comfort extended to me in prison came in the form of a cup of coffee. It had been two weeks since my last familiar taste. Richie slid a repurposed sugar packet stuffed with instant coffee to me under the steel door, mouthing, “That’s for you,” from behind the narrow window. In those two weeks, I had started a descent into a dystopian underworld of disaster. A flimsy foam cup of freeze-dried granules brewed with hot tap water was a little bit of a lift, doing away with an ounce of this tragedy.

Just two weeks prior, I was sitting amongst a stew of characters who filled in the quiet with a murmuring blather. Was it the place, the dust-shaking stir of the caffeine? Or was it the civility of all of the nighthawks piled together? The diner mug with the careworn logo fit perfectly in my grip. It wasn’t therapeutic or even restorative. Rather, the distraction of the din of jostled flatware and the bell banging against the door displaced the melancholy. I guess I find resolve and ceremony in coffee and its surroundings, much like the smoker with cigarettes, the boozer with vodka, the gamer with Fortnite.

“A cup of coffee carves out a parenthesis in the day. If you can learn to shrink the hours between the morning’s last cup and the evening’s first drink, you’ve taken a baby step toward enlightenment,” Dwight Garner tells us in The Upstairs Delicatessen.

I miss that particular color of coffee culture. The slowness. A few fried eggs, undersalted home fries, overmargarined white toast, and that stoic coffee. My coffee drinking doesn’t beg for attention. There can be pomp or pretension or crossed-over routine. It’s instinct, my instinct. Instant coffee is the Holy Grail, an oasis, manna, given the crawl across the desert of barbed wire and bologna sandwiches, through the barren dark night of felonious souls. Coffee shops need not apply here.

My Saturday routine at the diner has been replaced. Pat and I make revolutions around the walled yard, both of us heavy with life outside of this chapter. He walks with a Mountain Dew, while I nurse sink coffee from a plastic mug. We talk of travel; he wants to explore the lower East Coast, and I’m good with wherever Atlas Obscura points me. We’re both limited by the shackles of probation after this segment of our respective sentences. He’ll depart a year before me. Laps around a cinderblock-enclosed, razor-wire-trimmed kennel feel less penal when talking about travel and the baked gnocchi in this month’s Food & Wine as we sip our morning cocktails.

“I’m looking forward to Charlotte and making my way down to Savannah,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s good stuff. I have read a lot about Charlotte’s food scene.”

“Yeah, me too. Maybe I’ll get my folks down there,” he adds.

And so goes our conversation. Walking, talking, holding onto a cheap cup of cheap coffee. During that time, though, the walls melt away to become windows, and the talk is between two flawed guys begging salvation. We measure our days in sporkfuls of instant coffee stirred with an unlikely camaraderie, a rite of the disenfranchised on the rebound of atonement. It feels like common sense when the world is running down. At least our world.

I’ll be grateful—even happy—when Pat goes. His leaving makes my own departure an eventual reality. For now, when I walk, I catch reminders of the comforting familiar. Maybe that’s what coffee has become. It’s emotional currency. It’s a tie to what was, in its own yoke of exile. It’s also a tie to what will be, with new joys, grace, and forgiveness. Routine, like melancholy, hangs like a miasma in this cesspool of lives splashed out of the bowl.

Today, two 20-cent envelopes of coffee slid to me as a thanks for interpreting a letter from the court is akin to, “Hey, let me buy you a cup of coffee.” My analysis of Mr. G’s gratitude for assisting with a minor favor plants civility that tumbles into a day, most of which goes unexamined. In here, the helium lift will long linger for me. Is it caffeinated adrenaline?

These small exchanges are part of life in prison too: favors, gestures, routines, and moments of recognition that can briefly make an institutional world feel human.

So now I think of what will be, time served, a new page to be written. I am already grateful. Before too long (although every day seems an eternity), I will tip the crew at Starbucks from my “innocent” days while asking to buy everybody’s coffee. I’ll sit there with my friend Marge, nurse an indulgent oat milk latte, and discuss plans to change my world.

Today my thermos is empty, but it won’t always be this way, and that’s not the coffee talking.