You never thought you’d find yourself at this hour of the morning in a place like this, and you wish you could appear to yourself less out of place than you actually are. You got there after immense vestibular struggles, tearing your jacket at the shoulder that had christened the walls of the whole 3rd Avenue, walls that were essential for you to keep an upright stance, while thinking about what it would be like to sit with your nose pressed against the condensation on the window, as outside the city swarmed in the intricate anthill of the metropolis’s underground.
The hours slip away like scraps of time in the incessant rain, the night overcomes the inertia of time, and in that instant two o’clock turns implacably into five. The smell of water on asphalt enters through the door, filling your lungs. Within those four walls, where people seem intent on parading the abandonment of beauty as an ideal, human matter appears left in its larval, suffering state. And yet you decide, finally, to chase the storm. You leave that refuge of castoffs with cautious agility, pushing past the wreckage of bodies. The merciless daylight has not yet pierced you, but you sense that, if you dare to lift your gaze, you would discover the kind of sky Buñuel would have loved to film: bare, raw, condemning.
The scent of petrichor comes as a diagnosis, a primordial odor of drowned cities and funerals. You fancy yourself a walk-on in Mastroianni’s La Dolce Vita, except there is no Anita Ekberg to redeem you, only empty taxis, memories soured by undigested alcohol, no vintage Italian cars, only graffiti, puddles shimmering metallic green, and a man clutching a handrail like Christ in Grünewald’s Crucifixion.
And this Seven Essence tea, a 2025 Darjeeling first flush, is a confession of hidden memory, an echo from your compromised hippocampus able to grant grace even to one of these formless nights. It recalls the mineral scent of rock, buildings washed by a midsummer tropical rain, the dark humid nights spent cradling a glass; it carries that note of cake and caramelized fruit reminiscent of your mother’s tarte tatin at six in the morning, when you returned home sheepishly, with many good intentions and little balance. In this situation, the P312 cultivar seems to proclaim with satisfaction that nature manages to create grand works without pomp or excess. In its tones of aged wood and oat hay, echoes of moss and jasmine rise, preparing you for a perfect sip. one of those that seem to set things right, becoming a medical prescription for your attempt at redemption.
This tea is a window onto the beyond, a buttery tincture, sweet and herbaceous, the liquefaction of a Salgado photograph with its exasperated structure. The sip is lushly viscous, the sweetness on the finish borders on obsessive, its complexity remarkable, and the persistence so strong that it makes you forget your last dinner in a seedy diner. But now that note of petrichor offers a way out of the city you had once chosen as the stage for your aspirations, a bandage on the broken promise of art that was meant to illuminate mankind, but which to your eyes now seems reduced to rancid ketchup and congealed mayonnaise.
Wild Harvested 
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