it's 5 a.m. now

Bread

7:08 a.m. 

It seems a little embarrassing to hold onto the memory of a bread you were never able to name
but I never fail to bring up the dark rich taste of that toasted and buttered loaf that you'd share with me, your youngest, as we sat by the window and watched people go by and as you taught me about the world and how imperfect it was, that it didn't make me any less perfect
We shared that moment often and sometimes I wish I could be there again, that I could stay in an infinite loop of warm breezes and cold suns where the only thing I needed was my mother's smile and her words

The ones that slowly turned me against her as I grew older and rebelled against the thing she promised I was: perfect
I wasn't and I wish she hadn't ever told me that I was because I forever chased the nonexistent high, the invisible standard to be something I never was and never will be and that to me would have been enough
To be subpar at most, that seems perfect to me
A world where I didn't have to fight and cry because I couldn't get it out of my head that I never would be able to complete my mother's words and that I was making her out to be a liar
So I think about the crunch of that dark, molasses bread and how it held a warmth deeper than the fact it had only just been in an oven seconds before it had arrived in our hands but the warm gooey feeling of being able to remember the calm before the storm 

.s