Breakfast

I launch an attack on a grapefruit every morning. Perhaps it’s more fitting to say half a grapefruit, and yet there’s always the first cut. Before the grapefruit is a hemisphere it is a yellowing globe the perfect size for palming. Lines and grooves and lovely little bumps all over the place, like satellite pictures of the earth’s surface. I reach way on up to the highest cabinet to grab it, the one that is mine alone since it escapes the reach of my housemates. I can barely reach the shelf myself, but it’s worth it for space that is mine. On one occasion, while I was elongating myself up towards this cabinet, my fingers foraging around for the fruit while only the tips of my toes touched the kitchen floor, the whole sack toppled upon me. Grapefruits bouncing and rolling every which-a-way, one fell in a perfect arc atop my skull’s unsuspecting dome. It felt like a love tap, albeit a rather ferocious one. 

When I procure a grapefruit, if I can do so without injury, my other hand seeks a knife. This one’s been partially chewed up by a cat. It doesn’t look like much, grooves in all the wrong places. The weight of the fruit rests in one palm, my only partially demolished knife in the other,  and in both hands I hold power. The first cut is clean. It peels one grapefruit into two as easily as film coming off a temporary tattoo. Do you think the rest will be that easy?

Now there’s two halves, and might I say they’re looking dandy as a painting. They fell a little bit when I cut them, they rolled over real casual-like, perhaps they’re shrugging their shoulders. As if they’re a little sad at losing their other half, but they’re not one to dwell on things. That makes one of us.

The grapefruit is red, somewhere in between blood and sunset, something like skin that’s blushing, or maybe the flesh under the skin. There are 8 symmetrical, glistening little chunks of it, all tucked in and cozy-cute between protective pockets of rind. And yet the illusion of symmetry barely lasts past a decadent second of stares. There’s not 8 sections at all! How silly of me! There’s 10, nope, there’s another, 11, could there be 12? Look, there’s a little pocket of grapefruit hiding under the fold. Do you think it wants to be seen? 

I take my knife - still mangled, still managing - and I begin slicing. In the beginning of the era of grapefruits, I did this like a surgeon. Slow. Careful. Calm. Running my knife right alongside the white film that spins out like the spoke of a wheel. Carving around the edges, coaxing the flesh of fruits out from their shell. Letting my spoon slide into the spaces I had created, picking up chunks already independent of their roots. Back when I cut my grapefruit like a lady, every wedge was beautiful and quivering.

Now the knifing is a cursory endeavor. I make some criss-crossing lines, grating like a saw. I pull a rough circle around the edge, the knife slips and trips along, flesh does not part from its skin but bursts from itself. Juice droplets fly out from the knife’s path. Most coat the counter in a sticky sweet film. Some find my eye. When my eyelids are too slow to close their border, they are quick instead to beat out the stinging intrusion. The misplaced matter makes itself felt in a discord at the back of my skull. 

Blinking, I set the grapefruit on the table. It rests in a mini saucepan, blue and ridged with deep edges and a stumpy handle that thickens at the end, so that gripping it is a gratifying grind. The grapefruit fits like a dear inside it, and the handle as I hold it steadies the site of excavation for my spoon. Every person who has ever seen the saucepan asks me what the hell it’s supposed to be used for. None of them seem ready to believe that this saucepan was made for lacerating grapefruits. I am ready to believe it. 

The real fun lies in the spoon work. The spoon forces it entry, shimmying towards the grapefruits core and pulling back again with its prize. It emerges with a precarious hunk, a wobbling patchwork of jewels. You only get a chunk like this in the beginning. It feels like a gift. Soon enough the spoon will only reap the rejects of its former rampage. 

Each hunk is made of little morsels pressing against each other, and each of those looks like a tadpole. The tadpoles are pregnant with juice and permeable to light, but they reject the knife’s advances with more tenacity than you might like to give them credit for. When they do break over and spew their nectar for nourishment, the satisfaction is like sun on your back. Bask in it! I usually grant this honor, when I take time to notice it, to my top right front tooth. I position a tadpole in the line of destruction, and then I let my tooth sink, until my tongue tells me the fruit has popped like bubble wrap. 

Some days - and this is a secret, now, so don’t tell - I neglect the knife altogether. After the first clean cut through the middle, I jump ship and find a spoon. A spoon! I wrap all four fingers around it, tight, wielding it like a sword. My eyes sparkle with an eager glint. I stab. I scoop. I slice. I wreak some havoc on a grapefruit. 

The grapefruit in my mouth is tart and pulpy, thick and sudsy and sweet with a kick. The taste drifts over my tongue like mist. It rests there like a soft concerto, elevating the experience from backstage. But the eating of a grapefruit is not about the taste. I’m in it for the stabbing.  

When the grapefruit is inside me, and the saucepan holds nothing but a warzone waiting to be abandoned, I begin to squeeze. It’s a two-hand endeavor. I take the grapefruit and I wring it out, unleashing a mighty stream. The stream settles into droplets, steadily turning more staccato as they shrink. The juice seeps into my fingers and runs down the side of the bowls, and I press and push and plunder. Seeds - just two or three - swim among the juice in the bottom of the pan. I pinch them with two fingers, like squashing a mosquito in flight, and flick them back into the grapefruit’s hull. 

When the juice is ready for me, I lift it to my mouth and I slurp. It’s an unfortunate thing for anyone that happens to be passing by at this juncture. I open my gullet and I make a noise - louder, more animalistic than is strictly necessary- and my tongue juts out to form a bridge between the juice lake and the cavern of my mouth and I inhale. My housemates know to avoid it now. They see the first cut of my grapefruit - the one that is mercifully clean - and they scamper upstairs, slippered feet making quick steps along the floor as they leave it behind. You might think I’m being rude, what with my shameless devastation of a grapefruit and the peace. I think so too. But it’s only five minutes. And it’s only a grapefruit.