The Breakfast Room

Lyrics

Down from the second floor.
Past the fixed gazes of the Portrait Hall, their varnish cracking like dry smiles.
I descend into the face of the house.

The Foyer is a lung holding its breath.
I turn left, away from the grand stage of the Dining Room.
Too many ghosts at that table, all with perfect posture.
I need the smaller room.
The honest room.
The room where the morning comes in like a blade.

And here it is. The east light.
Striking the long oak table at a perfect, merciless angle.
It doesn't illuminate the wood, the silver, the china.
It illuminates the absence.
The one chair gone, but the light still knows its shape.
A column of sun filled with dust, where you should be.

The dumbwaiter shaft breathes a phantom scent of scorched toast and warmed milk.
Your face was always warped in the silver toast rack.
A funhouse mirror for a funhouse life.
I remember your laughter, or maybe I just remember the story of it.
The wallpaper shows tiny ships, sailing an endless blue sea.
They were sailing toward a new world.
They're still sailing. They never arrive.

And the smell of burning, when it comes, isn't a memory.
It's a broadcast. The sharp, black sound of a page being torn from a book.
That specific char, the scent of bread left too long under the heat...
it has the exact color of a name crossed out in a ledger, the ink still wet.
On the far wall, the light itself projects a silent film of 1932.
There you are. In the chair. Raising a cup.
A perfect morning that never was, trapped in the sunbeam.

And here it is. The east light.
Striking the long oak table at a perfect, merciless angle.
It doesn't illuminate the wood, the silver, the china.
It illuminates the absence.
The one chair gone, but the light still carves its shape.
A column of sun filled with dust, where you should be.

The light doesn't care.
It just arrives.
Every morning.
At seven-fifteen.
On time. Always on time.