I talk to the dead through drinking tea. Not always. For a time it was just part of the job. The tea. Sourcing it. Selling it. Practicing its secrets in plain sight. I still have my tools. My scoops and scales. Glass presses and clay pots. Chawans, chastens and chasakus stored in boxes I’ve yet to unpack. Bags and tins. Heat sealer and adhesive labels. I still have my sharpies and price gun. Shelf talkers, scissors, ball of string. I left the sidewalk sign behind but held onto assorted colors of chalk. An instagram account remains active with old images archived. And, of course, my tea collection continues to evolve. A wonder on to its own, but these days there’s no commercial side of the collection to worry about. No public consumption. All dead, so to speak. I’ve been keeping things in house. Rising in the dark most mornings to whisk a matcha with my bad left hand. Craving that sound a proper matcha makes while the waking world is still asleep. I can almost hear it pop when the foam is perfect. That’s how I know to stop, taking my favorite chaiwan to the office, lighting a candle on my desk with a kitchen match, maybe some incense, too, slowly polishing it off to the sound of her asleep in the bedroom across the hall. Nothing can match the music of an unconscious dog. The snorts and snores. The turns. Yips, yelps and growls giving way to muffled barks. The harmony of dreams. What does she dream of? Does she know how long I dreamed of her before she arrived. What I built so she would come? How many dream and sleepless nights I endured when she went missing. I know she’s different now that she’s back. And I know she knows I am, too. A renown writer I used to play tennis with years before he hung himself with a black leather belt by nailing it to a patio rafter in the backyard wrote once that “a dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.” It is one of the heady, if too clever for its own good, ideas he was famous for that got him killed. Men, hideous or not, who die by their own hand after professionally trafficking in too many endnotes don’t know shit about dogs, especially mine, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out since.