The Breakfast Buffet of the Soul

Just for fun: A mind working overtime at a Manhattan breakfast zootopia.

There is a particular moment in grief that no one warns you about. It’s not the sobbing-on-the-floor phase. That one at least comes with cultural recognition and decent movie soundtracks. No, this is quieter. Sneakier. It arrives disguised as a casual thought while holding a paper coffee cup that is actively dissolving in your hand. You think: Could there be… someone else? And then immediately panic, as if the Thought Police might confiscate your grief credentials.

Relax. This is not lust. This is not readiness. This is not betrayal. This is your nervous system rummaging through the emotional lost-and-found, asking, Do you have anything that feels vaguely safe? Psychologically speaking, what’s happening is attachment withdrawal. Which sounds clinical until you realise it’s basically your brain going: Well, that hurt. Let’s not die. When a deep bond breaks, the mind does not sit quietly and reflect like a monk. It panics like a raccoon whose favourite bin has been removed. It scans. It imagines. It wonders whether another bin might contain snacks. This does not mean you intend to climb into it.

Context matters. It is early morning. You are in a cheap Midtown Manhattan hotel where the décor says “temporary shelter” and the breakfast says “long-term consequences”. Your child is asleep upstairs, meaning your protector role is briefly on coffee break. Emotional exhaustion has clocked in early. Longing has been working overtime with no HR department. Your system asks, very politely: Is there another future available? Even a brochure? This is not a decision. It is a pulse. Like a system diagnostic. No action required.

Misinterpret this moment and things get messy. You might decide you should do something, which usually translates into attaching too quickly, projecting deeply personal needs onto a stranger whose main achievement is not dropping their croissant, and calling it healing. It isn’t. Read it correctly, and you learn something encouraging: your heart still works. It hasn’t boarded itself up or installed a “closed for renovations” sign. You don’t want chaos, you want connection. That’s hopeful, even if it’s inconvenient.

So what’s the correct response? Nothing. Literally nothing. Don’t chase the feeling. Don’t shame it. Just nod internally like a tired manager acknowledging a request they will not approve today: Noted. We’ll revisit. Then ground yourself.

Notice the clink of food warmers as they are opened and closed, the industrial hum of a waffle machine that has seen things. The smell of coffee trying its best. The fact that your child is safe upstairs. The fact that you are upright, dressed, and legally functioning. You are not broken. You are grieving. And grieving people look around.

The breakfast room itself is an anthropological field study disguised as a canteen. Long communal tables pieced together like an afterthought. People flowing in continuously, filling paper plates with processed optimism, fuelling themselves for another day of ambition, denial, and pharmaceutical loyalty. Opposite you sits a seven-year-old boy who coughs at you three times. Not maliciously. Just… thoroughly. You exchange a look with his mother, the universal “we are both aware of this situation” glance. She cups her hand briefly over his mouth, which is less a solution and more a gesture of good intentions, then leaves to collect more food, abandoning the cough to finish its journey.

This is early morning urban life. Efficient. Detached. Mildly alarming. For a few hours, this room becomes a melting pot of humanity: all cultures, sizes, outfits, moods, and levels of sleep deprivation, briefly united by scrambled eggs of uncertain origin. Then, like wildlife after a watering hole, everyone disperses into the city. New York absorbs them. Grief absorbs you. And somewhere between the coffee refill and the cough, you realise: your heart didn’t wander because it’s weak. It wandered because it’s alive.

You don’t need to act today. The buffet will still be there tomorrow.