When you wake up

Today I woke up, missing everyone. Friends, my brother, alive and busy. Friends, family, gone. Mum and Dad. Pets. Missing when I was a kid, or living with my best friend, or living as a wife. Missing people that I mutually or uncomfortably broke with. Its a heavy feeling, and it teases with the thought that something will happen today to create an ending, or something just not good. I prefer the days that I wake longing for cake for breakfast.

When you wake up wanting cake for breakfast, its a silly, nagging, tormenting voice. You want to, but you shouldn’t, plus you probably can’t because there is no cake in the house. Then you decide to eat muesli, add two spoonfuls of sugar because anything Mary Poppins suggested must be good. Though she only said one spoonful. Then you see someone jogging, slim, perfect hair, perfect outfit with the audicity to smile. Now you really want cake. Your local coffeeshop needs to sell slices of cake. Like doughnuts but cake. Then you wonder how many people wake up wanting cake. I’m a minority, I’m sure. Its like people in Panera with the choice of bread, apple or chips. They say apple. Apple?! How? When the gorgeous chunk of fresh bread is right there. Maybe if I had a chunk of bread, would that be better than cake? Then you realize, people have fruit for breakfast, and I remember the can of fruit cocktail in syrup sitting in the cupboard next to the tin of small potatoes. Were Pop Tarts invented for people who wake up wanting cake for breakfast? I really need to buy Pop Tarts. They are easier to eat cold while you drive to work. Do people who have to commute in public, wake up earlier so they can eat cake in private? Last night, I sharpened a bunch of pencils, in the hope of inspiration to write, and I notice my bowl of pencil shrapnel looks just like the muesli I breathed in. No taste, no satisfaction, I check that the breakfast bowl is empty to convince myself that I had eaten all of it. I may as well have devoured the pencil shavings, and maybe I was creative like Van Gogh who ate paint. I wait for my stomach to say thank you, as I watch another perfect jogger go by. I know I wish them a great day, while my envious, mean side hopes they hate their job, or cant read or they are a bad friend, or they are lousy in bed, and they will go to work straight from jogging, and everyone avoids them because they smell just a little bit. Thats it I will think about bad smells and that will suffocate my need for cake. Bad smells, bad smells, bad smells, and the fact that I do not like butter, or hearing people chew gum or seeing mayonaise in the corner of a persons mouth or the fact that I wake up some days, with an ache for everything that has gone. A book of closed chapters. The goodbyes. The missing. A toothbrush thrown away, a house emptied of laughter, tears, paintings and serving dishes. Its gone. All gone.

I prefer the mornings I wake up wanting cake.