Carmen's coffee

I read in the NOW Carmen's storyCarmen, who, while traveling in the Canary Islands, suffered an infection "that caused necrosis in the tissues of her face and left her completely disabled." She couldn't speak, eat, or drink. After three unsuccessful stints in intensive care, Dr. Joan-Pere Barret, head of the Plastic Surgery and Burns Unit at Vall d'Hebron Hospital, proposed a face transplant, a difficult and cutting-edge procedure. "Now I don't mind going out, I can eat again, I can drink coffee. I'm back to living a normal life," she said.

This statement moved me with its profound simplicity. Carmen is no longer afraid or ashamed to go out and be stared at. She is once again enjoying the wonderful, and often undervalued, thing of anonymity. She is "nobody" again. A woman with signs of time on her face (not her own) who does the things we all do when we're out in public. And, among all of them, "drinking coffee" stands out. How simple and magnificent to highlight, among everything one can eat or drink, coffee. That beverage that can be the beginning, if we have breakfast, or the end, if we have lunch. The one used to say "I want to go talk" and the one used to say "Let's stop for a moment." For my mother, who had never left the house, going for "a coffee at a bar" seemed like the ultimate expression of luxury, of feeling "treated." Why do we like it? I find it hard to say. But Carmen has made me think about these everyday things that we tend not to appreciate (and forgive me, I almost quoted her without meaning to). Moments(Julio Iglesias). To drink coffee again. It's like being able to smell again after losing your sense of smell due to COVID. I'd like to invite Carmen for coffee and listen to her for a long time.