I remembered this pet name today with a smile. It was from a time of beauty in my past, when days were short and years were even shorter.

Coffee is one of my favorite beverages, mainly because of the aroma and a very funny experience I had the first time I had it. As a child growing up I had a penchant for preparing beverages with an avalanche of cocoa powder. The thicker the mixture, the better. It was like I always wanted to make a slurry of chocolate from my mixtures.

However, I had never really used coffee before. It was a drink for my parents. I loved the aroma, but I was quite satisfied with my cocoa beverages. On a particular day, my cocoa beverage ran out and all I had at home was coffee, so I applied the same logic of excess powder in a small cup of water to make a slurry and immediately I put it in my mouth I had a major gag reflex. It was so bitter, I wondered what adults were going through to ever need to have such a drink. I turned out the entire cup of slurry, washed it and had another go. This time I just added a spoon full, tried another sensory test and voila, it was great. Not one to give up, I added another spoon, and it was still fine, with a slight bitter note emerging. Then I added sugar and wow, it was awesome.

When my parents returned home, I had to report myself, because their jar of coffee was almost out, but thankfully my mum had gotten a refill of my cocoa beverage and I never went back to coffee again.

As I grew up, coffee represented a perfect metaphor to everything in life for me. Too little was a waste of time, a more committed quantity can be amazing, but too much is too bitter to go down. I always tried to find the sweet spot of everything I was adding into the hot flowing water of my life. And so when I started dating, I was seeking a preferred pet name, because everyone was calling their partner one. I thought of “Sugar”, but I dismissed it, because even though it makes a cup of coffee sweet, it is not transformative enough, because a cup of coffee with sugar and one without sugar looked exactly the same. I also thought of “Honey” but like sugar, it was not transformative enough. And that was how “Cream” came to me. It did not only add sweetness but it gave the glass of coffee a different hue. It was obvious to all and the drinker, that something had been added to the glass of coffee and somehow, it also made the coffee aroma even better. And that was how I settled for “Cream girl” as my preferred pet name for my lover. In the most literal sense, my lover came into my life and made a transformation that went beyond sweetness, life became lighter and more fragrant.

Soon my friends took the pet name from me and I started seeing one too many people being called Cream girl around me, including those that should have been called “Pepper”, and so I stopped using the name.

Till date, when my old friends chat me up, they ask – “How is your Cream girl?”
It never fails to put an upside down rainbow on my lips.

– Osasu Oviawe