FR ANTHONY MUSAALA: The end of my yellow flask

Today I broke my yellow flask!

For three years I used it almost daily, until it broke.

Whether this was an accident or an ‘accident on purpose’ is yet to be determined.

I went to a supermarket to buy a flask three years ago.

One yellow flask remained on the shelf, all others having been bought, I guess, so I bought the yellow one.

When I got home I put it on the table in the dining room and noticed several things.

Some house residents who passed by the table halted to take a quick look at the new object but quickly averted their gaze and hurried away as if fleeing from a crime scene.

Others passed by without noticing anything, or at least pretending they hadn’t, but seemed taken back.

Whenever I appeared with that yellow flask I could see the dilemma in people’s eyes of an inner emotion of one kind versus an external expression of another.

I decided I would make good use of my lovely yellow flask with as little drama as possible. Colour prejudice is after all in very bad taste these days.

The dutiful flask did a good job keeping my coffee hot as was expected. I no longer saw its colour but was only thankful for its usability.

Sadly after a while, whenever I looked at the flask I too became alarmed as if seeing it for the first time.

The colour ‘yellow’ had become associated with negative things in my life, so the more I looked at my lovely yellow flask, the more it triggered negative feelings.

I tried to fight this prejudice but with limited success. I kept telling myself that yellow was just a nice colour with no good or bad to it. Oh, how I wish it were true!

However, certain negative thoughts and memories about the usages of yellow kept presenting themselves from nowhere in my mind and with increasing intensity.

When certain violent and unhappy events were shown on TV, I wanted to smash all things yellow and torch them to oblivion, flask included!

As a good Christian however, I prayed and remembered the word of God and tried to practice fore-bearance. I went an extra mile by trying to love and accept everything yellow.

I did this in the spirit of:

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44) and

“Judge not lest you be judged” (Mt 7:1-3).

Yes, because I too am not perfect.

In this way I lived three years with my beloved yellow flask, sometimes quite happily at other times, in near despair.

But today the end came quickly.

As I was stirring my coffee with a teaspoon, stirring just inside the mouth of the flask, (because I had put ground coffee in the flask with hot water) I heard a muffled thwump! and the sound of shattering glass.

I had hit the inner glass filament with my teaspoon and smashed it!

Was this really an accident, or was it subconscious rage?

Hot coffee spewed out of the mouth of the flask like a dying man spews forth foul death-juices from his mouth. And they just missed my hand.

I noticed that the spewing coffee was laced with silver-coated shards of glass from the shattered glass bottle inside.

All that sharpness and horror was now coming out of the cavity of the yellow flask, which had served me so well for three years.

Soon there was coffee all over the floor too with its aroma wafting up, and silver shards beneath making a pretty pattern on the cream-tiled floor, amidst the brown wetness of spilt coffee.

I looked around to see who else might have witnessed this earth-shattering event. I was alone.

As I somberly carried the plastic shell of my beloved yellow flask to the bin with its unappealing shiny yellow skin it was nonetheless possessed of a little morbid beauty.

I felt strangely elated as I lowered the yellow corpse to its final resting place in the bin yet also a little sad. I was bidding farewell to a long-serving slave whom I had loved to hate and hated to love.

Yet there was nothing to be done. It was over.

There was nothing left of this once useful minion, only broken dreams and inside, dank coffee grounds amidst broken bits of glass flooded in undrinkable coffee.