I make bread out of you

I make bread out of you. I reshape you in my hands, convinced I could only love you if you rose the way I wanted. Your texture must suit me; your starch must hold. I could fold in olives if I wished, or tinker with other variations. Sourdough, focaccia, rye—the possibilities feel endless, but none of them are really you. 

I could cut you any way I wanted. Score patterns across your surface, carve you into shapes of my choosing, remake you until you’re unrecognizable. But the more I carved, the less you resembled anything that could sustain me. 

Would you even keep me full if I ate you? Would you quiet that itch buried somewhere I can’t name? I could turn you into a sandwich—so excessive the seven sins would avert their eyes. Or reduce you to croutons scattered over a salad, my fingers circling the lettuce as if you were meant to belong only to me. I could even toss you to the pigeons and watch how they judge you in my place. 

But then, for the first time, I notice the warmth in you that isn’t mine to shape. The way you rise in your own rhythm, the way your crust cracks in unexpected places, the little imperfections I used to see as flaws—all of it is yours. I feel a tremor of something unfamiliar: awe, maybe even fear. Because if I let go, if I stop kneading and scoring and carving, I might see you fully, and in that fullness, I might finally see myself, too—raw, unshaped, unconsumed. 

And maybe it isn’t you I’m starving for, but the version of myself I imagine when I devour you. I don’t know why I keep remaking you, shaping you, kneading you into someone I can love, when all you ever wanted was to be yourself. Maybe it’s easier to control you than to face the emptiness in me. Maybe I’m afraid that if I stop, if I let you rise on your own, I’ll be left with nothing but the hollow space I’ve been trying to fill. And yet, even as I hold the knife, even as I fold you into my designs, I know the real hunger—the one I’ve been feeding all along—was never yours to satisfy.