A morning where your heart slightly overdid it with espresso
If your heart sometimes beats like a drum at a concert, this letter is for it.
Hi, this is Lily. 🌼
An artist who spent years painting flowers on canvas — and now paints the heart that lives on coffee and still tries to stay polite.
Organ & Habit: Heart & Coffee
I see a heart holding three cups of coffee at once. One cup for “wake me up,” the second for “get me through noon,” the third for “pull me together after everything.” The heart is still smiling, but there are tiny lightning sparks flickering around it: the beats are a bit sharper, there is a subtle inner trembling, thoughts dart around like little electric sparks. Too much caffeine can make anxiety feel louder, your heartbeat more noticeable, and leave you with that strange background fatigue — like you are both wired and tired at the same time.
I’m not here to steal coffee from your hands like a favorite paint color from your palette. Coffee is also a ritual: a smell, a warm cup in your palms, a small scene where you finally sit instead of run. It’s pleasure, a piece of aesthetics in an ordinary day. But your body, and especially your heart, sometimes needs pauses between these “electric sips” — a little water, a bit of food — so it can feel like a living garden that still wants to bloom for many years, not just a battery to keep recharging.
I think of it as adjusting a painting’s composition: not removing the bright color, but adding a few calmer tones around it. Your heart doesn’t ask for a perfect nutrition plan; it asks for a tiny shift — so caffeine becomes part of the story, not the only way you move through the day. As if it’s quietly saying from the inside: “Give me just one softer brushstroke, and I can keep beating for you much longer.”
The heart is offering a compromise:
1 — swap one cup of coffee for a glass of water;
2 — have your coffee not on an empty stomach, but after breakfast;
3 — keep your usual amount of coffee, but add one meal with protein today.
Write which you choose: 1, 2, or 3.
I’m curious how our little gallery of hearts with coffee cups will look today — maybe, for some of them, there will finally be not only lightning, but also a bit of soft light and water. 🌿
Lily Marigold
