Monday, October 4, 2010

Meal of champions

Note: The lack of posting has been due to a move into a new apartment. I just got the Internet back a mere few hours ago.

Kelly and I hover at the bar. He sips at a bloody mary (something he was craving), but I shake off any offers for a drink myself. We're on a mission. I am so hungry, I can find kinship with the Donner Party. The two healthy looking girls tucked in the corner look like they would make amazing sausage.

"Mark? Party of Two?" the hostess calls and I give the sausage girls one last look before I follow her and Kelly to our table. We've been up for hours, but haven't gotten anything to eat until just now. The waitress comes, a cheery girl I recognize from our many trips here, and we order without looking at the menu. There was never an option to what we would be getting. For the past few months, every Sunday brunch we went, Kelly and I ordered a drink (cocktail for him, sweet life-blood of the gods [read coffee] for me), pancakes, and a side of bacon. "You know, I think breakfast may be our thing," Kelly says as I stare the waitress down until she flips my mug over and fills it. I doctor it with the smooth movements of an addict and take the first sip to regaining the humanity I lost overnight. "Most couples do dinner, but we seem to do breakfast and brunch the most."

I try to justify it, but my brain isn't quite working yet. Breakfast has never really been a major meal for me. Growing up, it was pop-tarts or toast before the bus (Mom letting my siblings and I sleep-in as long as possible). In college, it was coffee, a cigarette, and maybe a bowl of soggy cereal. I quit smoking my junior year and increased my caffeine intake (against doctor's orders), to the point that breakfast was several cups of coffee before my latest temp job. The fact that it's "the meal" I have with my boyfriend is surreal (think less melty-clock Dali and more nude with a backbrace, nails driven into the flesh, and a rotting stone column where the spine should be Khalo).

Our order arrives as the folk band starts up another song. Kelly and I do the small talk thing for a moment, but the conversation fades into the clink of forks and knives on plates, ice sloshing in glasses, and my spoon stirring more cream into my coffee.

(The art references are "La Persistencia de la Memoria/the Persistence of Memory" by Salvidor Dali and "La Columna Rota/The Broken Column" by Frida Khalo.)

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