An ode to molasses bread

Oh sweet molasses bread . . .

I don’t have an oven in my dorm. Not even a little one. Everything heated has to be steamed, and so my favorite treat is no longer an option. Molasses bread. Dark, sweet, hot and slow - all things I desire.

Back home for the weekend I find my love again. Late at night when dinner has faded and hunger has waxed again, I sneak out to the kitchen and pull out some bread, butter comes next spread smoothly across.

Molasses. It’s sweet, yet I pardon my craving. When sugar is processed, stripped of minerals, darkness, and desire, molasses is what remains. Stripped of its purity, spirit, and sky, molasses has the things we crave under molasses’s guise. The reason we crave more sweet after sweet is that sweet doesn’t contain molasses anymore. Molassess does though. Dark, sweet, hot and slow.

After butter has been spread, and bread laid out upon a tray I tip the bottle and poor. Molasses moves slow, but not so slow as to let my mind wander. So slow that my mind is riveted to its flow. So dark that light licks at it, some reflected, some sucked in. The molasses spirals, pooling in and ever expanding circle across the bread. I crisscross in places, squiggle in others, and in the center simply let it spread. 

Bread, butter, molasses, it all goes into a toaster oven, dial set a little longer than I sense it ought. I wait.

I have always been an interplay between light and dark, sweet and deep, truth and myth. I have always struggled to find pathways for my duality of nature. Balance between what is dark within me and what is light.

I do not fight with good and evil. Not anymore. Instead I seek to manifest that which is good through everything I am. Light and dark, sweet and deep, truth and myth - story truth. I seek to build myself into a working whole that can - at all times - manifest all I am.

Bread, butter, molasses - heat transforms them from separate elements to one. The butter soaks in and molasses follows, mixing, melding into something new. The bread softens then hardens again as liquid leaves. I open the oven to find my bread transformed. I take it out, set it on the counter  to cool a moment then take the first sticky bite. Molasses bread - dark, sweet, hot and slow, all things I desire. Heaven. 

- So why doesn’t college have an oven?