If you could put a filter on a feeling, this would be it. Soft and airy like powdered sugar. Elusive like cotton candy when it hits your tongue.
The sun is in my face when I wake up. I’m on top of the covers, because it’s a sauna under my comforter. My alarm yells at me in a smug, self-satisfied sort of way, like it’s proud to still be employed during a pandemic. Why do I even use the alarm anymore? I don’t need to be anywhere. I could lie in bed all day if I wanted to, but that would be depressing. It’s June 13, 2020. It’s a Saturday, which doesn’t mean what it used to. A Saturday is a Tuesday is a Friday is a Monday is a Thursday is a Wednesday is a Sunday. They all go by so quickly, careening into each other.
I have to get up because my Pomeranian, River, needs to use the lavatory. I wrap her in a harness and reward her with little peanut butter treats. I step into a pair of worn sweatpants, slip-on sneakers, and pull a mask over my face. I pinch the hidden wire to fit around the bridge of my nose.
When we get back inside: shoes off. River’s paws are washed with warm water, polished with a wipe, and have paw balm massaged into them. Then, off come my outside clothes. The suggestion is twenty seconds, but I wash my hands for forty. Mask off. I tidy my bed and give River a dental chew to start her day. Then, an inky black gel pen and I sit down together. We dump all my festering thoughts onto paper for thirty minutes. The Pomeranian child parkours triumphantly around the living room, chew in mouth.
Now I feel a little better. I feel I’ve accomplished something. I look at the calendar on my computer and decide how to organize my unemployed day. Then, I commission a soundtrack from some Wes Anderson or Hayao Miyazaki film to restore a little wonder to my shelter-in-place wasteland (think: The Grand Budapest Hotel or Spirited Away).
~This is where something in the air changes. It starts with the music. If you could put a filter on a feeling, this would be it. Soft and airy like powdered sugar. Elusive like cotton candy when it hits your tongue. And then, the rest of the morning just seems to melt into place, like a dance~
It goes like this:
[Read quickly.] Day-old water from the kettle feeds the herbs in the windowsill. Fresh, cold water goes back into the kettle and murmurs over a bright blue flame. With music waltzing through my apartment and the kettle preparing to hit the high note of its solo, I brush my teeth, wash my face, finish with a rosewater mist, and press a sweet, cheap perfume oil into my wrists. It smells of oud wood and dark vanilla, which is the smell of my junior year of high school, which is the smell of pure nostalgia and enchantment.
Then, the grand finale approaches. The inside of a pearly-white teapot is soaked with bubbling hot water and stained with Earl Grey tea. Chilled oat milk is poured into a petite pitcher. A teacup clicks into place on its saucer with a small silver teaspoon at its hip. A round, pink breakfast plate is topped with fresh, homemade bread that’s encrusted with seeds. I split the roll open, steam rising as I slather it with butter and apricot jam. River’s dish is filled with soft sweet potatoes, a drop of olive oil, a fleck of cinnamon, and a handful of her kibble. (I mentioned she’s a Pomeranian, right?) Filtered water sloshes into a glass goblet––for added fanciness. Now, we’ve arrived.
[Slow down.] I’ve learned the subtle art of not staring at a screen while I eat (sometimes), so we eat listening to the soundtrack that’s been playing on my 2008 iMac desktop computer (who, 12 years later, is honestly just happy to be here).
A shy breeze cruises around us, mild and a little muggy, and River and I sit together while the world outside walks across the earth on its knees, and its blood is collected by the soil as interest, and we wait. Almost a hundred breakfasts so far. How many more like this? Will the world be able to stand after destroying its knees for so long? Maybe this is what we’ve earned, acting as the planet’s landlords and not its tenants.
[Speed up.] But let’s not pop the bubble. Let’s go back to breakfast. Yes! Breakfast: the extravagant entrance to an alternate world, existing separately from everything outside. All those things that might make me lose my appetite. How about another cup of tea? Another seeded roll? Did you know this apricot jam has no added sugars? They only sweeten it using apple juice! Have you tried the blueberry flavor? I love that one too, but it turns my tongue and teeth purple and makes me look like I had Merlot for breakfast. Lol! More tea, though, absolutely more tea. Tea. Jam. Oat milk. Pink plate. Glass goblet. Blue sky. Soundtrack playing. More tea, more tea, more tea.
Oh, bummer. The teapot’s empty now. Curtain on breakfast.
~An ambulance siren screeches down the block…the first of the day. The filter peels off and the portal to our alternate world zips shut~
Now what?
[Pause. Take a deep breath before reading the rest.] It’s almost like that feeling when the lights come up at a bar after last call. You remember. Just before it happens: all those twinkly candles and luscious drunkenness, time stretching out like taffy; the dark glowing, pulling everything in sight inside it, and then––BOOM. Lights up! Dissolved. Evaporated. Blown out like a birthday cake. The end of breakfast-time is a lot like that, stumbling towards something sobering and sickly.
So. This is where we are: crawling across the ground, six feet apart, with masked, anonymous faces, eyes frantically searching for something familiar. Searching for each other. Searching for relief…relief is the sound of tea dribbling into my teacup, of River crunching kibble, of the way the bread crackles when it’s right out of the oven––those sounds are like stepping from hot sand into cool grass. All the while, the sky looks at us, blue and quiet, and the earth turns coarsely like there’s rust on its axis.
And every flimsy answer to almost every feeble question is: I don’t know. We don’t know. They don’t know. No one knows. No one knows when we will know, how we will know, what we will know, or who we will know. No one really knows. No one knows if we’ll have the knees to stand again. No one really knows anything…but I know something. I know one thing: I know when breakfast is. And I’ve mastered the choreography of it. For a short time, until the teapot is empty, I can pirouette into this plush, vanilla-scented daydream, and my shaking hands try not to squeeze it too tightly and make it burst.
