She dropped a stone, maybe more in the month before the wedding, and everyone wanted to know how. I gave up bread, it was easy, I hardly miss it. Rice was harder, I had to explain to my mother who said I was too skinny but I’m a six now, can you believe it? and everyone in the break room murmured approvingly into their sandwiches.

When my own mother says I am too thin it’s bread she pushes towards me, with slices of that extra cured smoked pork belly on it, the kind where the fat melts as soon as it hits the warmth of your tongue. I can be indifferent to just about anything but bread, and there is no clothing size I desire so much as the taste of it, or better still the smell: that rich scent that permeated my grandmother’s house, she of the tea-towel covered bowls in the warmest rooms which cradled dough, generating its own heat as the yeast within it respired — a bread of sighs.

For the first two months of my first pregnancy, all I could manage was brown bread, toasted, my own little loaf rising. The thought of anything else making me sick and dizzy. Or after birthing my second, when they brought me cold toast, cheap white bread with margarine soaked into it, how I ate it licking my lips and body trembling like a hungry animal might.

If a piece of bread fell on the floor my great-grandmother would pick it up and then kiss it because she believed bread was holy. The difference between what is holy and what is sacred is as thin as the hard cold butter I curl from the block in sheer ribbons to soak into the toast every morning, but I think it is this: that a common thing can be holy, and a holy thing can be in the house where people live, it can be touched, loved, and even kissed.

What is holy permits the daily intimacies that what is sacred does not, can not.

I wasn’t one of the sandwich eaters, I actually don’t much care for them, but I smiled and congratulated her like the others. Thinking I would never, I could never. Thinking also of the hymn which says bread of heaven, feed me til I want no more.

I always want more.