Glutenous Memories

I am the kind of bread that will take years to mold.

There are threads running through life that reveal the soul because of their continuity. Search through your history to find them. Ask yourself: “What breathless things were there, then many other places, and remains?”

For me, there’s B horror, writing, reading, and bread. I’ve loved bread since I could chew, especially when it’s warmed. Go on, invoke the crunch of the crust that protects the dense cloud consisting of few ingredients (ideally). This thought engages the senses, arousing the nerve ends. This is erotic, not sexual–unless you desire it to be.

My family tells stories of my early life involving bread. I use the present tense because each time I conjure the memories, there they are, telling. 

My southern grandpa mimes grabbing bread rolls and pushing them into his mouth as he says, “All you wanted to eat was bread, and I said, ‘let my baby have what she wants.’” 

My English grandpa knits his eyebrows together and brings a hand to his face as he says, “Oh dear, I thought ‘all that child eats is bread.’” His eyes are downcast, staring beyond the floor as he speaks.

My grandfathers related these stories before I was able to hold on to shreds life as it passed. Their memories became my own.

There’s a story involving bread that is a memory of direct experience. 

It is one of my earliest memories, dense in atmosphere and distorted towards surrealism because of its age and my age when it happened. 

I was probably 5 when it took place at my great-grandparent’s yellow brick house that sat on the edge of Lake Peachtree. My great-grandmother passed away when I was 5, and I haven’t entered the house since her remaining children sold it soon after her death. So yes, 5. 

Surely there are elements I’ve inserted. They lend to the distortion of the images in my mind’s eye. I see the driveway around me; it’s like I’m standing in a milky river. The trees are bare, maybe because it is late autumn I’m recalling from, here at 30 years old. The man-made lake is visible through the branches of maple, oak, and pine needles. My back is to that murky lake filled with water moccasins. 

I see myself externally. I’m a blurry figure. I also see from my point of view—my outstretched arms.

I’m looking at my arms because granny is in front of me saying, “You’re going to turn into bread if you keep eating so much of it.” 

She is the most familiar granny to me in this recollection. Granny has short and high black hair. We used to tease her by calling her Elvis. She wears all black, long sleeves and long pants. She might be wearing an oversized t-shirt from a casino in Biloxi and jersey shorts. Granny flickers between the young self I never knew but is with me as a picture on my desk and the thin, drawn woman near death.

No one is solid and bright in memory.

My thin arms are pale but gold-tinted because of the touch of the Georgia sun I hadn’t learned to fear. The blonde hair could be the dusting of flour on the crust of a baguette. Yes, my arms look like the 12-inch rolls from Subway. I might be bread, I think to myself. 

I don’t take a bite of my arm. I’m not elated to be something other than human, perhaps because I haven’t registered mortality yet–that will come at age 8. 

I cry. It’s the open-mouthed sob of a child. I believe granny. I take her words literally; this creates possibility–what dark magic in this scenario. 

The memory ends with a feeling of desperation for a different reality, for something other than finality.

This experience didn’t give me a phobia of bread, but my stomach hurt throughout my childhood. I spent years in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals. 

Maybe I did eat too much bread.

I began to control my intake when fear of a stomach that could be grabbed overtook me as a girl whose age could be counted on fingers or toes, not fingers and toes. 

I ate bread but often only that. 

Last year, my dad told me that he has Celiac disease. He thinks I may have it as well, that it might explain a lifetime of digestive issues. I didn’t go to the doctor. Instead, I began baking loaves of sandwich bread. 

I couldn’t sleep a couple weeks ago. My heart beat too fast as I laid in bed. I got up, from warmth to feet pressed to a cold, wooden floor, and went to the kitchen. The half baguette in the bread box was more vibrant than anything else, more than the leaking refrigerator or the white countertops that absorb spilled food or liquid. 

I’d been wanting a tartine because my husband had made a few for himself before dinner–warm slices of bread, butter, and salt. I hadn’t allowed myself to eat any tartines. 

I cut two slices, added a pat of butter to each, then sprinkled salt.

The sensation!

I cut two more slices,

then two more, 

Finally, one more.

Ecstasy, truly. 

I fear the surrender of myself to experience. I worry that all the feelings, whatever may arise, will kill me. 

I fell asleep after I ate. 

I was led to these memories because, moments ago, I pressed play on “Timeless” by John Abercrombie. This song induces a trance-like state, which is necessary for an active imagination session. 

The imagining opened with what I recognized as myself in the form of dough, stretched and featureless, being kneaded by invisible hands within a void. 

This suggests there are many possibilities of form because of my inherent formlessness, and that maybe I would like to take a bite out of myself.