My fancy hotel room last week had a room service breakfast card. If you left the card hanging on your door before 3am, you’d wake up to breakfast at your designated time. I filled out the card one night, skipping through the oatmeal section, to pick out my eggs, my juice, and my “granary toast.” Then, on the bottom of the card there was a Mad Libs. As a writer, whenever I see a blank space I have to fill it.
On the bottom of the back side of the menu was a note that read “Or, write down exactly what you’d like for breakfast.”
“Exactly.”
The clock strikes 10am and I slowly wake up to the meows of a hypo-allergenic cat. She’s playful and toilet trained. My husband is already up, he has been for a while. He started his day rescuing injured birds who’ve flown into windows and then he came home and washed up before making me breakfast.
He picked fresh figs from our front yard, those are room temperature and sliced on a hand-thrown ceramic plate. In my fantasy, I am skilled enough at pottery to make my own cookware.
Breakfast should be salty, savory, crunchy, soft, and warm. My husband knows this, I’m just telling you.
Next to the figs there are two 7 minute boiled eggs. The eggs were laid by our neighbor’s chickens. We can’t have chickens of our own because the cat is territorial but our neighbor (Julia Louis Dreyfus) is very generous. There are two fresh slices of sourdough bread that my husband made. He got into sourdough baking way before it was a covid trend. He got into it when he interned at a wounded bird sanctuary in the south of France. The flour is from the grocery store. We don’t have time for the hand-milled shit.
The butter? I’m glad you asked, the butter is the $12 French butter from the stupid grocery store where lemons are gold plated. The butter has visible salt crystals and was wrapped in wax paper by a loving woman with a gentle disposition.
There’s smoked salmon of course, because we live in the fjords. My husband will catch a salmon in his hands on his morning walk and take it home to smoke it in our outdoor sauna/smoking structure. Today’s salmon is from last month’s catch of course. The bones and skin go to the cat. She can only eat salmon and oat milk.
The grapefruit juice is fresh squeezed. We live in the fjords but we have fig and grapefruit trees. Anything is possible when you’re in love.
I’m awake and walking to the kitchen to sit down and have breakfast with the love of my life. We met because he came up to me after one of my standup sets and said he was blown away by my intellect and wit and didn’t even notice until standing so close how deeply beautiful I was. I liked him because he didn’t aspire to the stage at all. Also tall. Anyway.
Breakfast is eaten on our porch. We live in the part of the fjords where it’s always 68 and partly cloudy. Perfect weather for sitting and starting the day. The cat comes in to take in the view.
I get a call but I ignore it, I’m eating a perfect breakfast. It was my agent calling to tell me they’re optioning my book for Max. Not the streaming service, my friend Max. He loves to read. In my fantasy I already have a show but it’s on Hulu, I’m for the people. In my fantasy actually my show runs on Nick @ Nite but that’s out of my control.
That’s exactly what I want for breakfast, but I ran out of room on the card so I just ticked the box next to “full English.”