Coffee
Horatio entered his apartment and dropped his keys on a side table. He walked over to his kitchenette. There, he scooped some coffee in his coffee machine, poured some water in it and turned it on. He walked over to the window and looked down on the streets below. He heard the water in the coffee machine cook. A few minutes later Horatio took his mug filled with hot coffee to his living room, where he sat down on a chair near the window. He had never been a man for alcoholic beverages; he preferred hot coffee so much over alcohol and that preference had become stronger while he worked in New York, where the cold winter blizzards were too cold for beer, wine or perhaps whiskey but great for coffee and hot chocolate. But Horatio never really liked things as sweet as hot chocolate.
Why was he thinking about such silly things now?
He needed to appreciate simple things as drinking coffee near the window while watching at the people down on the streets, for he had gone through so much things that weren't as simple as this in his life.
The death of his mother had been very complicated – he still could not understand half of what happened at that time.
Then he and everyone else thought his brother Raymond had been killed. He recently found out that Raymond had not been killed at all, but that it was all staged for Raymond was supposed to go undercover. The casket had been sealed and Raymond had disappeared, so everyone thought he had been killed.
But the difficulties had really started when Yelina's grieving over her husband was over. Yelina had gotten back to work and the tension, the chemistry, that had always lingered between them, started to grow larger and larger until it had become unbearable. Rick Stetler had complicated it even more by starting to date and abuse Yelina. In the end, Horatio had drawn a line and finally, he even had been able to uncomplicated things. At that time, he had found out that Raymond was still alive and was in danger. Horatio had sent both of them to Brazil.
During this whole Yelina-stuff, a CSI had died under his supervision. Timothy 'Speed' Speedle. Speed had been killed when they visited a jeweler's investigating the case of both a kidnapping of a little boy and the murder of the boy's biological father. The jeweler had swapped the stones and he guarded the real stones with armed guards, who had attacked Speed when he drew his gun. The whole gunfight had been confusing, but it all came down to one thing; Speed had been killed. Afterwards, Horatio kept having this horrible nightmares in which not Speed but he himself got killed. Now, years later, the nightmares were still around but weren't as frequent as they used to be.
After Horatio had sent Yelina to Brazil, the year had been quite lonely because the usual small talk between him and Yelina plus the chemistry had vanished. He still had his CSIs to talk to but that wasn't the same as talking to Yelina and his nephew Ray jr.. Halfway through the year he had met Marisol Delektorsky, the sister of his CSI Eric Delko.
After this, his thoughts became blurry. He didn't want to think about it. But – he remembered he had married Mari and after the Mala Noche had killed her, he and Eric had chased a guy all the way down to Rio de Janeiro, where they incidentally ran into Yelina. And now Raymond had been killed. From then on, his thoughts became even blurrier, everything was so confusing. Everything was horribly confusing.
All this confusing made him appreciate simple things as sitting down with hot coffee, a break-through in a case or perhaps even someone who let him enter a building first even more. A hot tear rolled down his cheek and fell into his coffee. All those memories. Why had life to be so difficult?
There is one thing he did understand – if none of these happenings had broken him emotionally, nothing could. His emotions were unbreakable, because the chain of them had become so strong by keeping them to himself.
Let your heart be full of everything. That's something he'd always remember. He didn't even know who had told him that, ages ago, but he always let his heart be full of everything. Everything that hurt him. All emotions. He was nothing more but an empty shell filled with emotions. Horatio got on his feet and threw his full coffee mug against a wall. The coffee left a dark-brown stain while the shards dropped on the floor. Horatio grabbed every little shard and pieced them together. This was his shell. His cracks. The coffee were his emotions. And something kept smashing him against the wall, until he would break. But he was unbreakable. A warm and fuzzy feeling spread through his body until he was fully aware that whatever tried to smash him was never as strong as his own unbreakable shell…