Starting from the day after my wife, Irene, died in April of 2017, images have appeared virtually every day in the cup of coffee I continued to set out for her. The reason I kept pouring her a cup of coffee every morning was to help with the sense of continuation of her presence in my life. I could not bear the thought that our morning routine of sharing coffee and a cigarette with each other had come to an end.
In the beginning, I noticed later in the day that an image kept forming from the little bit of milk she liked in her coffee (along with a half-packet of Sweet 'n' Low.) I took a picture of that image when it became clear it was part of this larger set of synchronistic signs involving flowers and a TV commercial. Here is what that earlier image, from back in mid-2017, looked like:
These "radiant flowers" as I called them were not very detailed or complex. It didn't matter where I put the coffee, what was going on in the room wrt fans and/or air conditioner. At least subconsciously I thought this was probably just some weird physics having to do with the shape of her cup, general vibrations and the heat of the coffee cooling down over time.
However, one day that same year, after the grief had subsided, I told Irene that she could stop making the flower in her coffee if she wanted, that I was okay. Honestly, I didn't really think the flower would stop appearing, because I really thought, deep down, it was just physics.
The next morning I set her coffee out, and nothing at all appeared in her coffee that day. It remained a smooth brown color with no milky marks or blotches at all on the surface. The day after that, still nothing. It blew my mind, and I realized I had made a mistake. I told her that I was wrong, that I really did want to continue seeing the flower she was drawing.
The next day, the flower reappeared.
One day I got a hummingbird sign from her, and a couple of days later the following drawing appeared in her coffee, the only time anything like this ever appeared there:
Over time, Irene has done some pretty amazing things with these drawings. They will appear in different ways, sometimes fading into view as a whole image, sometimes beginning with a kind of swirl; sometimes the radiant flower appears to be blooming or growing out of its base. The drawings usually begin to appear within a couple of hours, but sometimes, when I have been busy during the day, I did not think to check on it until early in the evening, many hours later, and occasionally there has been nothing to see but a smooth, brown surface.
Then, I say something to her in a lighthearted way, like, "Hey, babe, are you taking the day off? Where's my flower?" Then two hours later, before going to bed, I peek into the cup and there it is, my flower, fully bright and visible.
So, she has made it clear, at least to me, that she is the one making the drawings. In June of 2018 I tried a bit of automatic writing, where I don't look, think of other things, and let my right hand just scribble on some paper for a while. I filled up three pages. I found this message, running sequentially, on the last page:
"My milk flowers lets you know I love you forever my lover" "Lover" was always her pet name for me. There were only two other words that appeared on three pages of scribbling, after that sentence: young + home (with the plus sign between them.)
As I said, her drawings have become increasingly complex, so detailed that I have trouble capturing that detail with a picture. There are often thousands of very finely detailed lines in her drawings. If you look closely at the following recent picture, you can see what I'm talking about:
... which brings us to the image at the top of this post, which occurred the day before yesterday. I noticed early that something was going on in the coffee I'd never noticed before. A couple of hours after I had poured it, I noticed it was swirling - it was in motion as I watched, and had already produced the following image:
A few hours later I checked it, and it was the image at the top of the post. I've never seen anything remotely like that in her coffee before. It' a stunningly complex and strangely familiar design. I have my ideas about what she is showing me, but I'll leave it to the reader to see and interpret for themselves.
It looks like a fractal design. Very intricate.