Overheard at breakfast

Let’s begin with breakfast, my favorite meal of the day, which I also happen to skip the most. I was my mother’s companion on an overcast morning in Metro Manila. She had her blood drawn that morning. The test was not available in our hometown—already a city, but not yet big enough. Famished from her overnight fast, she asked if we could have breakfast right away. The hotel hospital cafeteria was at the end of the hallway, and we couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere else. It was only 6:30 am. The restaurants around the area were still closed—and for good reason. We ordered coffee and shared vigan longganisa with garlic rice, and cleansed our palates with toasted ensaymada.

While waiting—the kind lady named Danielle warned us the kitchen would take 15 to 20 minutes to prepare our orders—I thought of how to craft a lecture for Prof. Marjorie Evasco's graduate class at the De La Salle University called Pathography: Writing Illness to Wellness (course code: LIT370M/D). I was reading a book and pondering, looking into empty space, when a family of five took over the table next to ours. The children, in their early twenties, looked a lot like their parents. They were on the chunkier side of human anatomy, which explained the meals that would descend on their tables, like manna from heaven, but with many side dishes. They spoke to each other with tenderness and familiarity, if they were not looking at their phones. The big sister said she’d just have coffee; the kid brother told her to stop pretending. She must have listened to her brother, because daing na bangus with garlic rice emerged on her plate a few minutes later.

My mother at this time was tinkering with her phone—a busy game of Candy Crush. From our quiet table near the cash register, I listened with rapt attention to the family from Bulacan, curious as I was about the human condition. I heard worry and concern: their grandmother had an MRI. That was as far as I could make sense of the conversation. I did not know what the MRI was for, but the tone evoked a sobering seriousness. I realized, as I sipped my coffee, which Danielle so kindly brought to our table, that our existence is a mixture of joy and sadness, comfort and suffering, breakfasts and MRIs and blood tests. We, all of us, live in a broken world, full of its sadnesses and longings. Above us, in the patient floors and ICUs, were people getting better or fighting for their lives.