Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Breakfast City: A Senior Surreal Photo by Elise Vanderlip (2012)

On the morning when the man with the goatee lined the cold fry pan with eggs, their skin thick and white and peppered with spices, I watched the sun rise in the eyes of my ears and heard a song in a dream I will be forced never to forget. I walked to the top of the Berkeley hills and looked at the sloping green hands of the coastal mountains as they held within them the silver grey metal of the city. Looking out, I remembered that mossy day when the warm fog curled its fingers into my hair. When I meandered to the tip of Fort Mason and watched the tiny sailboats like tears of milk or breakfast tea floating beneath the red bridge. The bridge was like a smear of blood behind the fog. The waves grew into buildings, the fog dissolved and in its place was a sun looking down upon my moist head like a beady eye. I walked beneath the shadows of the buildings on Market Street, haunted by the smells of breakfast-of toast with boysenberry jam, fresh waffles, and Italian coffee. I came home and found the tiny coffee press upon the stove, engulfed in blue flames and hissing sharply. On my walk, I counted the clouds like candles in the sky. And the whitewashed walls of my imagination became cracked and confused and discolored. We accidentally left our books out in the rain, on the porch railing. You said they were ruined. I said they became beautiful bending flowers of brown, acrid-smelling paper. I could see my face in their moist covers. I could see my face in the stripes of the sea, in the stripes of the bay, in the stripes of my thoughts and my broken pencil poetry. I could see my face in your face and I could see your face in the yellow of the warm yolks the man with the goatee served me that New Year's Day.
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