It Doesn’t Settle
💀 TCDJ™ Entry 003 - The cup was not meant to hold liquid. It was meant to hold memory.
The cup was not meant to hold liquid. It was meant to hold memory.
— Annotation, Vessel Studies Dept. (Redacted Year)
It should’ve been comfort. That’s what it’s for…
The drink, the heat, the mug cupped in both hands like you’re cradling something sacred. Or fragile. Or hot enough to remind you you’re still here.
But the swirl doesn’t settle.
Drink.
And it never rests. And it hasn’t for days. Or weeks. Or years. Or whatever time becomes when every morning is the same and the milk keeps moving.
A steam stroke grazes your cheek like a mouth that knows exactly where you blush. It lingers longer now, warm breath trapped against skin, soft as a whisper you forgot to answer. Beneath the skin, something curls tighter, like veins taught to crave heat.
The first time you notice it, you laugh. Fair play, it’s only coffee, innit?
Because it’s just a drink. But the laugh doesn’t last long. The spiral keeps turning, and soon it isn’t pattern but presence.
You stare. You keep staring. Because something in you recognises it.
Not what it is.
But how it is.
The way it folds into itself without closing. The way it repeats without resting.
It moves like thought. Like hunger with a face. Greed gnawing the cupboard door. Lust licking its lips in the dark. Wrath grinning through small talk. Then silence. A faint ceramic tick, like a clock forgetting how to count, breaks the hush.
More.
Part of you suddenly wants the mug bigger, the coffee bottomless, your throat wider. You imagine it. The drink threading through you, slow, steady, tugging something loose you didn’t know was clenched.
The swallow would hurt, but only once.
It moves like the thing you did not confess when you were ten, and again when you were twenty, and again last week, when someone reached across the table and you smiled, greedy to be seen yet terrified to be known.
There was someone else at that table.
They asked how you were, and you smiled like your mouth belonged to someone else.
They touched your hand. You flinched. You don’t remember why.
Or maybe you do, and that’s the problem.
You haven’t touched the cup since it began to move like this.
You only watch. And wait. And let it become the only thing in the room.
At first, you try to describe it:
Spiral.
Vortex.
Soft collision of colour.
You call it a mouth.
You call it a message.
Then you stop naming it. Names make things smaller. And this is not small.
This is not metaphor.
This is the it. The thing behind the thing.
You looked too long and now it knows.
You looked too long and now it has learned your face.
You think about drinking it. The way some people drink gods, or gulp down wrath like neat whisky just to feel it burn. But you’re not ready. Maybe you never were.
Because the swirl still moves, and if you drink it, it might stop. And if it stops, you’ll know you imagined it. And if you imagined it, then what’s been watching you?
It doesn’t speak, not in the way mouths do. Yet something passes between you in the steam that coils up and brushes your face like a hand that knows your bones. It maps the shape of you with warmth, like breath pressed gently through your ribs from the inside out.
The swirl moves, and in moving, it begins to rearrange you.
Not in the dramatic way. There is no scream. No snap. No rupture. Just a slow warping. A quiet yielding.
The way stone forgets it was once mountain. The way breath forgets it started as air. The way your thoughts forget they were yours.
You’ve heard people call it intrusive thoughts. The sudden voice that says “jump”, or pictures slicing skin for no reason, or wonders how hard you’d have to hit someone to watch them drop.
Anxiety.
OCD.
Ego death.
Possession.
Someone called it the dark self: not evil, just hungry.
Maybe that’s what the swirl is. Maybe it’s older. Maybe it’s where the dark self goes to pray.
Every thought you’ve ever exiled lives in the drink now. Every want you starved. Every image that made you sit up gasping. Every moment you said “I’m fine” when you were anything but.
It’s all there. Thickening like milk that won’t dissolve.
It’s not memory. It’s marrow. It isn’t asking forgiveness. It just wants you to look.
You try to look away. You don’t. You won’t. Because the cup holds you now. And you realise.
The swirl is not the message.
It’s the medium.
The message is what it drags out of you.
What it teaches you to taste.
It asks nothing. But you start giving.
You thought it was ritual. Turns out it was instruction.
You give it silence first. Then your attention. Then your hunger.
Mine.
You don’t eat much anymore. You want to say it’s because you’ve lost your appetite. Truth is simpler and obscener: you are full of swirl.
It lives in your chest, where your name used to sit. Lust curling like smoke, greed pooling like cream, wrath simmering under the foam. It tastes of salt at the edges, iron beneath, bitterness at the root. You say your name and taste them.
You used to say your name like it mattered. Now it tastes like someone else’s memory. And it’s lodged behind your teeth.
You dream of ceramic. Of heat. Of brown folding in on itself again and again until it becomes language.
You give it language.
A spark of heat imagines the cup shattering in someone else’s face. Porcelain stars and perfect silence, the splash of liquid leaving burns shaped like fangs.
Through the kitchen window you glimpse neighbours sipping in peace; the swirl tightens.
Coveting their calm.
You kneel like a penitent in church, You kneel. Mug between your palms, breath held, spine bowed. Not in prayer. Not in fear.
In reverence.
Chosen.
Because the swirl never rests. And neither do the hungers it’s named for. And neither do you.
Not anymore.
Somewhere, another vessel learns to listen. Because the thing in the swirl has recognised you. And you. You have recognised it too.
And that recognition opens a doors. Inward.
There’s no threshold. You didn’t cross over. You just stayed too long. There is only the moment you forget how to speak in your own voice; the moment you taste it. Really taste it. And know you were never meant to leave this cup.
The swirl doesn’t settle.
It moves beneath your ribs now, stirs behind your tongue, hums beneath your breath. It curls where your hunger once lived and keeps curling.
The swirl doesn’t settle.
And neither do you.
Not anymore…
Somewhere, another vessel learns to listen.
The swirl doesn’t settle. And neither do you. Not anymore.
— Custodian of Cups, Interim Status Report