The copper cezve has been on my grandmother's stove since before I was born, its hammered walls darkened by a thousand mornings of slow heat. She would pour the coffee into a white fincan and drink it in silence, leaving a thin sediment at the bottom. Then she would turn the cup onto the saucer, wait three heartbeats, and begin to read.
A Language Older Than Script
The shapes in Turkish coffee grounds are no more random than the stars that prompted the first astronomers to map the heavens. My grandmother never called it fortune-telling — she called it okuma, reading, the same word used for deciphering a letter from someone you love.
The grounds were a letter from the unseen, written in a language that required patience and an intimacy with how liquid moves across porcelain.