For me, the word breakfast usually entails the feeling of peacefulness only hot black coffee, rock hard pandesal and still-taste-bud-teasing tapsilog-from-yesterday-morning can bring.
Before taking a sip of my coffee, I tickle my nose first to relish the sensation the aura of the liquid emits just as the way I smell the aroma of the wine before rewarding myself of its inexplicable taste. Drinking wine is swallowing a ball of fire and feeling it burn your throat, roll down your esophagus and target your stomach. Drinking coffee is almost the same but with a lesser impact on your stomach and a greater bang on your heart. You don’t swallow a ball of fire, instead you take in a meager amount of liquid that doesn’t target only your tummy but also a lot of personal connotations it brings. A good morning with grandpa, for instance? Or a very romantic sunrise view with this special someone? A big, big sigh usually follows.
My teeth become nearly like blades when they touch the rock hard pandesal. Perhaps it’s because the harder the food, the more challenging it is. Your teeth grind pandesal the way typhoons crush bridges --- with little or no effort at all but always leaving the same level of destruction in its wake. The pandesal is nothing compared to my teeth that grind and chew and cut it into pieces. My tongue judges whether the pandesal is still considered edible after days in a place where there is little or no sunlight at all.
The tapsilog, on the other hand, still have the impact on my taste bud as it had yesterday morning, and sometimes, the day before it. It is something classic, something timeless, the basic of being a Pinoy. Tapa usually shares this medieval dance with sinangag and my teeth. The itlog (egg) sometimes joins; I prefer ravishing it solo.
Add a couple of pages from the entertainment section of Abante and the company of all sorts of insects (usually flies) parked in midair and the ambiance is perfect.
Perhaps, giving up the peacefulness of breakfast is one of the sacrifices that I have to (forced to, actually) endure in order to graduate from college; I have been deprived of this atmosphere ever since June. Instead of wine-like coffee, soft-to-me pandesal, and classic slash timeless tapsilog, I now face the ‘most’ of almost all the tastes combined. My breakfast is usually sour and always bitter. I know that it can be occasionally sweet depending upon the person you sit next to. Problem is I never had it sweet for the last two and a half months which is devastating. I miss the euphoria that raping a banana can bring, as well as the happy feeling you get after murdering an apple. I miss the way my tongue refuses to free itself from Cadbury in the instances that I had it for my first meal of the day. It wraps itself firmly to the chocolate, taking in every sweet molecule while my brain does its work of storing the sweet, sweet memory. INSTEAD, every day, I have to sit with a number of people who watch my face distorted right after tasting one of the sour ingredients. My right eye usually narrows down to a slit and the right part of my lip goes up to complete the picture. Hell, what part of being a chocolate-lover do they not understand? A great many of the people I take this demonic breakfast with might be thinking weird stuff about me. Just because they like their faces twisted at weird angles after being spoon-fed by the cook himself doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else does. Lastly, IT is bitter. It IS bitter. It is BITTER. My tongue always goes numb whenever it encounters something it considers not-so-edible. It automatically moves into the weirdest positions because of out-of-the-world spices. The process of taking it in is bitter, as well as the digestion, and most especially, the aftermath. The sense of taste isn’t only for the tongue. It’s for your whole being to enjoy or to suffer from. I still can’t recover from my breakfast last July 10, August 06 and August 09. The cooks can be really mean.
Although this breakfast is ‘too much’ for my taste, I know that it can practice my stomach for the second level known as lunch. This is just the first step; I see a candle lit dinner awaiting me.
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