Kofi Ahmal didn’t mean to start a cult. He just wanted to track his habits.
Firstly, he bought a chrome coffee machine and a notebook. He vowed to drink only one espresso every day for a year. 365 days. 365 espressos.
‘Consistency is the bedrock of genius,’ he told his cat, Barnaby. Barnaby just licked his own leg, unimpressed.
Here is how the year went down:
I. The “Honeymoon” Period (Days 1–90)
In the beginning, there was light, and it was crema-toned. Kofi was a barista god. He bought single-origin beans from places he couldn’t even spell. He bought a small digital scale to weigh his grounds to the nearest tenth of a gram, and began describing his morning shot as having “notes of sun-dried hazelnut and a whispered promise of blueberry.”
II. The Mechanical Breakdown (Days 91–180)
By the third month, the romance had faded into a cold, hard routine. Then, one rainy day, tragedy struck. The espresso machine gave a pathetic hiss, coughed up a single oily tear, and died. Kofi panicked. He couldn’t miss one single day. The spreadsheet would be ruined. He bought a backup espresso machine the next day. And a backup for the backup.
III. The Ascendancy (Days 181–300)
It is a fact that the caffeine had permanently altered Kofi’s DNA. He no longer slept; he just rebooted for twenty minutes at 4:00 AM. He became terrifyingly efficient at life. He learned conversational Japanese over a weekend.
IV. The Final Stretch (Days 301–364)
Kofi’s friends stopped inviting him to dinners. It wasn’t because he was mean; it was because he spoke at 4x speed and kept trying to optimise their chewing patterns. His eyes were permanently dilated to the size of dinner plates. He had calculated the exact extraction time of espresso down to the millisecond. If a shot took 26 seconds instead of 25, he would weep openly.
V. The Grand Finale (Day 365)
The final cup. Espresso number 365. Kofi’s kitchen looked like a mad scientist’s lab. The espresso machine was practically glowing from overuse. Kofi raised the cup. ‘To science,’ he whispered to Barnaby. ‘To discipline.’ He downed it.
VI. (The Aftermath)
Kofi woke up. It was 4:00 PM. He had slept for sixteen hours straight. His head felt clear, his heart rate was a gentle, human 70 beats per minute, and the world was delightfully quiet. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a box of Chamomile tea, and sighed:
‘Let’s see what 365 days of hot grass water does to a man.’
