He wasn't supposed to be thinking it.
He was supposed to have forgotten, to have moved on, to have wrapped his little cliché up neatly and folded it into a storage box, locked up until perhaps he was older, and reminiscing was a pastime and not a longing for change.
He wasn't supposed to have given himself over to daydreams.
He sat at the breakfast table, spoon half dangling over his cornflakes with residues of milk slowly dripping over the table.
He didn't notice.
In his minds eye he was watching her, fluttering about his kitchen making something warm for breakfast. French toast maybe, or eggs. He can smell something cooking either way, and it mingles with the taste of her good morning on his breath. He would sigh perhaps, contentedly and think about going to help her. She'd swat him away, and tell him to sit down and be patient: and oh how he'd be patient for her. He'd sit quietly in a corner if she told him to, and wait for her until the air rusted over with crusty memories and his joints stiffened from longing.
She'd have a coffee machine, and the heavy tang of her morning brew would hang over them slightly, tickling her fringe, his nose. The radio would sing of promises and future, and as he reached out to hold her he would close his eyes slightly, and thank each and every g-d for allowing him to.
He would worship her.
She might not like the mornings as much as he, so she'd stick to her morning coffee whilst he attacked his breakfast with gusto. He'd feel guilty on reflection, that he stopped admiring her to eat his food; but the combined glow of food and the promise of the body that would wink at him from beneath her nightgown would outweigh anything as dull as guilt.
Or perhaps she'd wear his shirt, an old one she'd picked up. Buttoned up save the collar, an occasional glimpse of nothing beneath veiling his thoughts and covering anything coherent with overtones of something stronger than sex, stronger than this. Stronger than him.
She would perch on his knee, sipping her coffee and wrinkling her nose in distaste at his early morning appetite, tracing the lines etched around his eyes. She would press a kiss to the bridge of his nose, and smile.
A rustle above him jolted him out of his reverie, and he was slammed back into the cold reality of his kitchen, burnt toast and spilt cornflakes seeping through the edges of his fantasy and roughening it up. He gently reached out, and folded the paper hopes neatly away in a file marked 'consequences.' He'd deal with them later.
Or perhaps, not at all.
Perhaps he'd continue to ignore them, and file them away.
Perhaps he'd rename the file regrets, and be done with it.
Perhaps he'd exhaust his capacity for longing and desire.
Or maybe, just maybe, he'd hang on to his dreamings, just for now. So that when he went to sleep, bathed in the chill of regret and frustration he'd have something warm to cling to.
