the Breakfast

Since the children had left, my mornings felt even lonelier. Each
day when I woke up I stayed in bed for a while listening to the birds
for company before I went downstairs to lay the breakfast table. I lit
the candles, switched the radio on, a little Bach here , a little
Mozart there and waited .
When he finally arrived, an hour after I had finished with the morning
paper, I just looked at him. I had eaten my muesli a while ago and was
still sitting in front of my green tea that I drank like medicine.
Heaven knows why it tasted so bitter.
He arrived with just "Morning". He should have noticed the sad little
flicker in my eyes , but he did not look at me. A slight smile on his
lips, he tenderly stroked the cat. With a soft voice he talked to her.I
watched him moving around. He knew there was a task to perform, for he
only had two household tasks: making filter coffee in the morning and
emptying the dustbins once a week. He acted like a silent robot. When
he put the coffee flask onto the breakfast table, he uttered:
"There...."
I groped again for the paper, rereading frantically the headlines to
calm myself. I really did not want to read during breakfast, but there
was nothing else to do. I had to occupy my mind somehow. I had never
managed to understand his silences, sometimes he called it "depression"
which made him also unable to eat his cereals straight away. He drank
his coffee staring in front of him, avoiding my eyes and waited for his
appetite to appear reluctantly like a stubborn mule.
These were the mornings in my life when, perhaps because I had a
different vision and higher expectations, I already felt sulky before
sitting down at the breakfast table. The root of this lay in my
childhood. My family always had celebrated the happy morning hours at
the breakfast table chattering easily to one other in a friendly
manner. After having been married for thirty years to an introvert and
depressed man, I now had to be careful not to upset him further.
So we both were silently sitting and waiting:
I for a word from him to acknowledge my presence, he for the hunger to
emerge that he had lost a long time ago, together with the appetite for
life, the excitement for a new day and the certainty that he was
loved.