Mold

Photo by Rodolfo Marques on Unsplash

I grew up knowing that bread had a kind of honesty to it.

You bought it fresh, soft and warm in your hands, and then you watched it change. After a few days, small green or grey patches would begin to appear. Quiet at first, almost polite. Then spreading, undeniable. It was a simple lesson: things do not last. Even the most ordinary things obey time.

These days, I find myself waiting for that same ending, and it does not come.

The bread stays the same. Day after day, it looks untouched, as though time has agreed to leave it alone. And I cannot tell if this is progress or something else entirely.

Maybe it is a good thing. Maybe we have learned how to slow decay, how to preserve what once slipped away too quickly. There is something reassuring in that, the idea that we can hold onto things a little longer than we used to.

Or maybe we have done something stranger.

Maybe we have made something so resistant, so altered, that even rot does not recognize it anymore. As though the natural ending, the quiet return to the earth has been postponed by something we do not fully understand.

And there is something unsettling in that too.

But then, there is another possibility. A simpler one, less dramatic, almost embarrassing in its honesty; that I just finish bread faster these days.

Maybe the loaf does not have time to grow old because I do not allow it to. Maybe hunger has quietly rewritten the timeline, turning what used to be a slow observation into something immediate and practical.

And now, standing in the kitchen, thinking about mold and time and the small mysteries of ordinary things, I realize that I might just be hungry.

And perhaps not everything needs to mean more than that.

Maybe.

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