Day 1: No Bottled Starbucks Peppermint Mocha Iced Coffee

There is something about the first day that stings, like stepping barefoot onto a forgotten shard of glass in the grass. It’s the day you realize that the absence of a thing can be sharper than its presence ever was. The first day without bottled Starbucks Peppermint Mocha Iced Coffee is not unlike a Genesis of sorts—a reimagining of the primordial, an excavation of a lush, dangerous garden that still lives somewhere in the soul.

We all have our trees, don’t we? Mine stood tall in the refrigerated aisle, its fruit a seductive promise in seasonal red-and-white wrapping. The first sip was a flood of cold, creamy sweetness, that intoxicating blend of chocolate and mint spiraling down into the caverns of my being. Each bottle was a self-contained Eden, and I was both Adam and Eve, reaching without pause, without thought. The serpent was clever, but I was complicit.

The temptation wasn’t just in the taste—though it was maddeningly good, a simulacrum of winter mornings and warm hearths—but in the ease of it. To pluck a bottle from the shelf, to twist open its cap and let its manufactured perfection cascade over my tongue, felt so achingly modern. A gift from the gods of convenience, served with a smile at checkout and a sigh of relief. I told myself I deserved it. Who among us hasn’t?

But today, the garden is closed.

I can’t deny the ache, the phantom presence of something that was never truly nourishing but somehow felt essential. That first craving hits with the precision of a well-aimed arrow. My body, so finely attuned to the caffeine-laden sugar rush, reaches out like a child grasping for its parent’s hand in the dark. It is a mournful reflex, this reaching. And yet, in that moment, I know—truly know—that the thing I crave was never built to last.

It is the fleeting nature of it all that strikes me hardest. A bottled Peppermint Mocha is, after all, an ephemeral pleasure. Its sweetness, like all sweetness, dissolves too quickly, leaving behind only a trace: the hollow pang of sugar crashing in my bloodstream, the jangling buzz of caffeine unsettling my thoughts. And then, of course, there is the cost—not just the absurd $5 per bottle, but the invisible toll it exacts. The weight it adds to my wallet’s absence and my body’s fatigue, the way it clouds my mind with the haze of dependency.

In a way, it feels like a spiritual reckoning. The first sip was never the problem. It was the second and the third, the inevitable fourth, the bottles stacking like Babel in the recycling bin, each one whispering promises of comfort that never fully materialized. What is temptation if not the promise of ease?

The myth of the garden was never about the fruit itself, I think, but about the choice to consume it. To trust that something outside ourselves—something small, fleeting, and external—could complete us in a way we cannot complete ourselves. What a story, what a trap, what a deeply human thing to believe.

And yet, I choose to believe in another story, too. A story of determination, of leaving behind the garden and learning to walk in the wilderness. To forgo the false sweetness for the truer, harder work of being whole.

So, on Day 1, I choose strength.

I drink water. I make tea. I press my body through the fog of withdrawal and tell myself this ache is a kind of blessing, a sharp and necessary reminder of the cost of momentary delights. There will be other temptations—there always are—but today, the garden has no hold on me.

There is something about the first day that is painful, yes, but there is something else, too. A whisper of possibility, a glimmer of creation. Not the creation of convenience, but the creation of a new self, built not on fleeting desires but on something deeper. Something enduring.

And so, the first day without bottled Starbucks Peppermint Mocha Iced Coffee becomes a beginning, not an end. A step out of Eden, and into something infinitely more real.