I used to eat breakfast
The thing is gone. The room still smells of it.
For a few years, the first thing I did every morning was light a cigarette.
Before I was properly awake, usually on top of the night before, out on the balcony while the sun was still behind the building opposite. There’s a particular clarity to the first one on an empty stomach. The room tips a little and then settles, and you can mistake the tipping for being alert.
The day had one item on it: keep up, get faster, close the gap. I could have told you exactly how wide the gap was on any given morning. I carried the numbers, the ideas, the half-finished feelings around the way other people carry keys, and I never once put them down. Anything that wasn’t that was overhead, and food was overhead — half an hour, some money, and a dip afterwards, and none of the three could be spared.
So I ate when the edges of the room started going thin. Hunger stopped being something I felt and became something I diagnosed, late, from symptoms. And I was almost pleased about it. It felt like efficiency, that gave me satisfaction. Like I’d found a way to hack it all. I remember reading about self-debrivation before, but i never thought it would descise itself, It was up to this moment that i first knew that the feeling of stasifcation might not actually be right.
Earlier this week, as I was reading about Buddhism, I learned about vāsanā. The word comes from perfume. The picture behind it is a cloth kept in a box with incense: take the incense away and the cloth goes on smelling of it for days, out of nothing of its own. In the Yogācāra texts the vāsanās are the impressions our actions leave behind, seeds lying in the mind that ripen later into the way things look to us, without being asked. What caught me is what the tradition says about how long they last. The affliction can go and the vāsanā stays.
Which makes me wonder about mornings. I’ve spent years telling myself I’m just not hungry before noon, and I’ve said it the way you state a fact about your own body — some people can’t drink milk, I don’t do breakfast. But that isn’t a fact I was born with. I trained it. I spent a few years teaching myself to read the signal as noise, and I got good at it, and then I kept the result and threw away the receipt. Now it presents itself as temperament. It says: this is just how you’re built.
So maybe, just maybe, I