Skipping breakfast

Breakfast is a meal for those loved by someone in their life. This is a revelation I’ve come to now that I’ve turned traitor on a core belief I used to utter as a child — breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I can’t start my day right without it! 

I believed it up till my 20s, and stuck with it even through college where it was only a shitty cold breakfast spread in dining halls waiting for me the extra early mornings I had to wake up for the early morning classes. I guess I stuck with the habit because I wanted to honour all the breakfast I’ve had before in my life. Growing up, every morning I’d be sat before breakfast cooked up by my mother. It used to be triangles of wholemeal Gardenia slices cupped around a thick slab of Nutella. Then it became eggs and bread, noodle, soup, made with love and the sacrifice of 30 minutes of my mother’s extra early mornings.

Now, though, I’ve broken that sacred promise and have skipped straight into the day unarmed and usually a little unprepared. That is how it feels to be flung into adulthood with a little less familial support. I couldn’t bring myself to have the plastic bags of buns and pastries from local bakeries, made with far less attention and worth the convenience at a price of $1.60 a piece. I’ve been spoiled by breakfast made with love, and twistedly have decided that a body unworthy of that love is also a body that must be deprived from the nourishment. 

It seems that I’m condemned to remain bleary-eyed stumbling into each week, alone, until maybe one day my prayers may be answered with a simple breakfast in bed again, steaming with enough love that makes me vision go wobbly.