Its 1pm on Saturday and I'm sitting at
Puccino's in
Toorak Village waiting for my breakfast to arrive. I look around at it strikes me that there are basically 2 sorts of people who eat their
breakfast at a cafe at 1pm on a Saturday.
First there are people who at the moment are
utterly content. People who have woken up this morning after sleeping late. People who have woken up this morning perhaps with their
limbs intertwined with someone else's and have stayed like this for several hours because
it feels good. People who have lain there and savoured the full glorious weekend stretching out before them and not minded that it is already
slipping away. People who have eventually left their bed and resolved to go and have breakfast at a cafe where they can sit and contentedly
watch the world go by.
Then there are people who have woken up this morning and immediately
retreated back into unconsciousness from the
empty void of the weekend stretching before them. People who have lain there
semi-conscious for hours because they cant quite face activity or thought right now. People who eventually
crawl out of bed because otherwise the whole day will
slip away like this. People who have resolved to go and get
breakfast at a cafe because
you must eat, you have to eat and they cant even summon the motivation to cook something themselves and besides if they don't
find a reason to go out then they could easily spend
the whole weekend without leaving this apartment. People who sit in the cafe and gaze at people of the
other type and want to reach out and
break apart their cosy little world, to visit it with
unpleasantness and discontent simply because they can remember a time when they too used to sit at cafes with that
dopey contented look on their face.
People like me.
My breakfast arrives with the
short mac I ordered. I have noticed my tastes in coffee have
evolved recently. I always used to be a
flat white kind of guy or maybe a
latte if I felt
daggy enough. Something milky with some sugar. Now though, I drink
serious coffee.
short macs,
short blacks,
ristrettos - the
shorter the better and absolutely
no sugar. I love them. I savour them. I seem to
revel in the bitterness.
It is only later that the
metaphor occurs to me.