After The Bread Is Gone Shenan Prestwich
“The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlivened with champagne.” -Samuel Johnson Love is like being enlivened with champagne, yes, everything rises, everything is light and furious, bright and deadly and devil-may-care, everything is spices you’ve never tasted and colors you’d never pluck from roots growing in your backyard, when it’s new at least, when it settles it’s more like stout, richer, slower, more opaque, like a chair pulled up to a well-worn bar with names etched so deep they can’t be shaved down without shaving straight through the wood, or up to a fire, a pleasant, sleepy fever, though one that can be alarming at the touch of a draft from a suddenly open door, waking you, an ale whose body and milky head can be deceivingly light, leaving you wondering at old, oakey barley wines and saisons with the funk and tease of springtime tongues rolling. But stout is nourishing after the bread is gone. Resentment is like eating too many red onions that climb acrid up your throat hours later. Sadness is choking on whatever you eat. I am a tomato and you’re a sharp knife, and you’re a pat of butter and I’m a pan, or a pool of olive oil with cheese scattered like confetti on its surface and you’re a glass of wine that cuts through the fat and calms the burn of a balsamic floating through me. 10
Mostly we’re the crumbs in each others’ pockets, and meeting you? Like muzzling my hand lunging always towards the bread basket after swallowing my first pumpernickel roll, still hungering for dishes that hadn’t made their way yet to my table, drifting constantly to tear off one more bite of crust. But stout is nourishing after the bread is gone.
