Unlimited Breakfast Ch. 1 (VERSION 2)

I was born and raised in this city by my father, my mother died before I was born. I only knew her from my father’s pictures that he kept taped to the banister. He used to say her name with a little scrunching of his nose and a faraway glinting in his eyes. An idiosyncratic man he was. As a young boy I became infuriated often with the reams of sellotape he kept in every cupboard, just in case. The memory that he kept alive did not belong to me. When, at school, I drifted off into daydreams of my own design, I used to imagine a woman with tawny brown hair in a flowing white cotton dress, that softly swept in the breeze, and lingered around corners she turned. She would always be cooking lunch, some kind of light meal to get you through the day and keep your belly rounded. She placed the lunch on a soft ivory-white plate with a delicate but meaningful gesture, and purity emanated from the food that lay warm there. Then that world would be stomped out, imaginative clouds hastened away by schoolmasters berating me for looking out the window glassy eyed and vacant, the image of her, and lunch, echoing into the ether. But this story is not about her.

I grew up with my father, Benedict, in a greasy iron coloured apartment block in the east of the city. Our area was fairly historic, well known for its tall, matte, brutalist tower blocks that looked over criss-crossed little alleyways like monolithic sentinels. Footbridges broke up the skyline like the branches of trees, stretching across from building to building and casting canals of shadows on the pavement below. Through it all itself ran a solid, deep canal, which used to be the main artery into the city centre, heaped stacks of coal making their way slowly by way of long barge, their engines rumbling deep as they slipped through the oily brown water. We used to play alongside these boats as children, running up and down the lengths of water, shrieking, and dodging the workmen, and as teenagers we sat on the brick walls that flanked it, drinking wine and laughing, having arguments over simple facts, making ourselves in eachother's image; foolhardy and raucous.

In the present day, tourists come through to feel the remainders of this grit and ardour, of which all remains are those hulking husks, buildings that once were home to friends now transformed into the depraved and derelict. The tourists clutch cameras to their chests, looking around at this part of part of a much larger and fast-paced town. They are wide-eyed and happy, bemused and kept deluded by their notions of a vibrancy that no longer has any material grip in the present. Their chatter bounces emptily off concrete as they walk slowly through the large plazas between the tall tower blocks in their brightly coloured puffer jackets, where flat leaves dance lifelessly in cold gusts of wind. The visitors are safe in their quiet detachment when looking through their viewfinders, and when they have seen it all, they hurry back to cleaner streets, and brighter lights.

When I was growing up here, we had a saying in our tiny two-man family: don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. You couldn’t afford to lose any eggs at all. My father assured me he came up with the phrase, and at the time I believed him. But then he died in an omelet fire. 
I came home from school one evening to the carnage of a crowd kept at bay by police tape, the reflection of statue-like figures sitting on the pavement, foil blankets flashing intermittently as they were lit by the blue strobe of the siren lights. People were looking up in awe of this great destruction before them. To the edges of the crowd a couple of news reporters stood silently, microphone in hand, their faces lit bright, bleached and horrible by camera lights, as they stared into the barrel of lenses, waiting to catch a signal. From above, flecks of ash fell like gentle snow, transforming the once profane pavement to a strange, dusty carpet, that all felt unwilling to walk on. The smell of smoke and burnt plastic permeated everything. It was the top half of the tower block that sat stolid, black, charred, and steaming densely; drops of water fell off the burnt wooden siding. There once was a great inferno, it seemed, and now it had turned to skybound clouds. I counted the floors upwards from the bottom.

The fire brigade, coroner, and several independent officiators decided that the cause of the accident was one man cooking his morning meal. It was the insatiable lust for breakfast that was my father’s life force, his drive, and it killed him in the end. My father loved breakfast. He loved making it, and he loved eating it. He used to make an omelet every single morning for fifty-four years. He taught me about the hob, how to twist and wait for that fiery metal glow to flow through your pan, to give your breakfast life and energy. The phrases and words that had become etched on the walls of my mind now seemed to glow with an internal force like that very same induction hob on full- and it hurt. It really hurt. These words he spoke to me were tempered in their creation, they shone a path through his grimace borne of the gentle searing splatter of bacon grease that glittered so finely in the morning sun, caught like dewdrops on his hairy arms. “Make your own damn breakfast!” he used to shout at my bleary eyed face, half smiling, half in pain, but with an endlessly hungry glint in his eyes. He used to wave his shiny, melted plastic spatula up and down like a wizard’s wand.

Our eggbasket had burnt down. All our eggs lay in that one place. My father had died making an omelet. It was all a sick joke, really. Chaos and death dressed in a two-man horse costume, clopping down the avenue of fate. I could not accept this grief that had been thrown on me, ashladen. I became consumed by a battle between the absurd and the real. Every day and every night seemed to blur, my memories chopped and changed upon recall. Each single moment of experience could be used as evidence to define my existence as consistently painful, as if I was guilty of a crime. On recollection on my own again, where I thought I could be whole, every action I took further proved my guilt, though I was guilty of nothing. The knots of this double bind were tightened on every movement. The worst of us all now lay in my smallest action. I found myself hopelessly lost in a reality where my father could not have been. It was as if my whole being existed deep in long and empty canals, clouds hung lifeless far above me. In these nightmares, I as a human being stumbled through these long, deep paths, and as i looked back the torrent of water rushed forward. And, though I tried, I could not turn my mind around, and stop that flood behind me to save myself from drowning. And so I drowned. 
The only option was to adapted to this life, to cease even slight analysis, to cast myself in the image of my own mind. In fact, I became very good at hiding, quietly masking any interaction with others, with towering thick walls between us, fearful that they might hear myself stifling internal screams, until I would be alone again, and my internal screams turned louder and directed themselves further inward, burrowing like worms through boggy soil. And as I tossed in this existence the very fibres of my being became frayed. I was stretched too thin. I began roaming the streets, seeking something without knowing it. My beard grew long and ragged, my soul became black and empty as a cold and unused saucepan. This went on for months. 
I woke up one morning and caught myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were sharp and bloodshot. The sudden reflection of a man who’s identity I did not know frightened me. Unrooted I cast my mind back to any memory with a pulse, perhaps I thought about what I used to look like, but I could not remember. Instead, standing before me, was a man, small, weak, frail, emaciated. But in that moment, I felt a pause. And instead of the of loss, the desperate desire to be seeing a recognizable figure, instead of the compulsion to hide my eyes from the sight of my very own skin, or rip my own skin off, I felt a pang deep in my gut and a deep booming of a distant gong far away over a shadow covered hill. Without my conscious decision, I had decided that it was breakfast time.
From my gut started to bloom a very soft sadness, which ached and  unraveled through my stomach slowly, like the growing tendrils of an ancient fire, so ancient as to be inalienable, and undeniable even from within a wild nightmare. I understood this longing not with words, not as a consideration, but as a wholeness, and as it began to grow, for my father, for my mother who I had never known, and for myself- for what I had missed in these months gone by, granted to me was the idea that it was no wonder I could not have seen myself eye to eye. And then, the wholeness that had suddenly appeared left me. I found myself beginning to weep, tears running down my cheeks and leaving track marks along the grime I had accumulated on my face. I heard the droplets hit the sink with a dull tap. I looked out through the bathroom door behind me, through my bedroom that lay naked of any semblance of order, through the window at the end of the room as the dawning sun burst a soft orange through the clouds, razor sharp beams of morning light hitting the corners of my furniture and casting odd shadows, igniting the motes of dust floating calmly in the very same air that I was aware now, that I was breathing. I was gripped with warmth and a fearsome power, the recognition of my self, my place in this sunlight, and a true desire, a hunger and a craving. I stood there still unafraid, and surrounded by mess. As it was, it made me want to laugh. I set off towards the kitchen to cook breakfast.

I decided with absolution that I would make breakfast every morning, pious to this new lease of life. At last I have understood my father's practice. My allegiance has never dwindled. The spirit of breakfast, I have found, transcends location. My morning meal finds me, as much as I now gravitate towards it. 
I write to you now from within a police academy. I have the wish and solemn promise to myself to save those from death, which so patiently followed me as it took my father, death in the form of a starvation of the soul. This particular morning, I had soft-boiled eggs with buttered toast, and a cup of coffee, which set me in good spirits when I left the house. As I shut my door behind me, I had no idea that it would be a long time until my next breakfast.