【Cake Bread】｜Dialogue with memory

Recently, when I have nothing to do, I buy some cakes to eat. Whether they are from bakeries or individually packaged cakes, they have become a good thing to satisfy my appetite.

When I was a child, I didn’t like cakes, but bread even more. When I was in elementary school, I would get up at six or seven in the morning, and bread would appear on the dining table on time. Six to eight, sometimes more, small and big, all kinds, from the bakery in the shopping mall downstairs. I always think those are overnight bread, cold, hard and not tasty. Sometimes, I would hear my mother opening the door, and then her shouting: "Get up, you're late!" The three brothers and sisters then took turns getting up and brushing their teeth. The one who got up first got the bonus of picking bread, but my brother didn't eat what we liked. . When I am bored while waiting to brush my teeth, I will squint my myopic eyes and look at the bread in the transparent plastic bag like a newborn baby. Occasionally, I will hope that the pineapple bun in the bag has red beans and the cocktail bun has custard, otherwise it will be very dry and unpalatable. .

On cold days, my mother would oversleep. If she could make it in time, she would rush back to buy a few bags, while the three of us would wait at home. If we couldn't make it in time, we would eat a few biscuits, drink a box of soy milk, and go to school. My brother was five years older than me. I was in elementary school and he was in middle school. His school was in a different district. If time was tight, he would blame my mother for her insistence and angrily walk away without eating bread, leaving a large bag of bread for my sister and me. When I was a child, I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t understand why my brother was angry, but every time I saw my mother in a panic, rushing back to the nest like a swallow to feed the hungry swallow babies, the dry and unpalatable bread made me obedient. Swallow. Like a puppy, it knows how to read its owner's brows and eyes. As I grew up, I discovered that those insistences were my mother’s inner voice.

Sometimes my mother would buy cakes, cupcakes, banana cakes, and some with strange flavors. Cake is better than bread, firstly because of its freshness, and secondly because it tastes better than bread, and it doesn’t feel like it was “overnighted”. Actually, I don’t know what “delicious” should taste like. There is only one bakery in this housing estate. My mother always said, “A good meal is not a good meal.” The most important thing in the morning is to feed the stomach and make it easy to eat. I like it. When she said she had "choking in the neck", she drank some water or soy milk and swallowed it. It was like drinking Chinese medicine with Jiayingzi. Cakes don't appear often, I don't know if it's because they are more expensive or for some reason, but I always feel a sense of repulsion from that bakery, making cakes a complicit criminal. After I entered middle school, my school was in a different district, so I got the privilege of not having to eat bread. My mother gave me some pocket money and let me choose my own breakfast. From then on, I was "out of trouble".

It felt like relief not only to me, but also to my mother. She is not a well-educated person and has not had the opportunity to receive higher education. She is a woman with simple thoughts and language. She is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese family values, and her role as a mother puts a lot of pressure on herself. Money drove away her inner voice, and she realized that her son was no longer as ignorant as the child he used to be. She found that the greenhouse-style upbringing did not help the child to grow up in a harsh environment of violent storms and snow. For me, my mother’s gift of money was a gesture of “empowerment” and an affirmation of my growth. The bakery was renovated after I entered middle school. My younger sister, who is in elementary school, still eats the bread. I heard that the quality of the bread has improved. When I get home from school, there will occasionally be bread in the refrigerator that my sister left over from the morning. Unless it’s something I haven’t eaten or like, I won’t be tempted. I label bread "for hunger" but not cake.

In fact, the greenhouse-style cultivation has not stopped yet, but my mother has become an important person for me to prove my independence of consciousness. From middle school to college, my mother had long been out of the role of preparing breakfast. Until this year, when I spent more time at home, she suddenly worried about my breakfast again. Now I want to cultivate a sense of ritual in the morning and let my brain focus more on important things, so eating fruit mixed with wheat bran and drinking black coffee has become my menu to open my brain in the morning. My mother felt distressed when she saw it. She said that you are so skinny that you can’t eat enough. Why don’t I go to the tea restaurant in the morning and buy you a set meal. She kept nagging for a while, like this every day, but I had no intention of listening. My appetite was not whetted. I am used to respecting my body and not eating too much for breakfast. Occasionally she would insist on making eggs or noodles, but I refused to eat them. She said I was very rebellious and stubborn. I know her good intentions, but I know this is her way of putting responsibility on her shoulders again. My kindness will only make her return to her previous life bound by her identity. She would be very worried if her younger sister had ambitions that were not pleasing to society, and she, who was not good at speaking, would always quarrel with her younger sister. I told her that the label of identity gives you invisible responsibilities. The iron shackles of responsibility hold your legs, and you cannot go far. The world is centered on home. When we become adults, we have the right to choose what to eat for breakfast. If the breakfast we choose is not delicious, filling, or nutritious, it is also our own choice. A life of choice is the source of my joy. I often say that mothers have become slaves to their children. She regards raising us as an important occupation in life, but when her children understand, they should unshackle her and let her live her own second life. After some resistance from me, my mother has recently been happy to meet new friends, and traveling with her father and friends has become her spare time.

Back to the topic, it was only when I grew up that I discovered the beauty of cakes. In other words, it was only when I grew up that I realized that eating cakes can be the dessert in life.

I'm not a weirdo. I just didn't know how to choose cakes as snacks when I was a kid. For me, it couldn't satisfy my hunger, so it wouldn't be used as breakfast. And the small one wasn't enough for me to enjoy while watching an episode of Doraemon, except Except for eating cake on birthdays, the positioning of cake is very vague. I even think cakes are something that only girls can eat and buy, and boys are the ones responsible for eating cakes bought or made by girls. This is an absurd gender stereotype and value. It wasn't until all kinds of expensive cakes appeared on the market that I discovered that cakes are something that many men and women are flocking to.

Today, my mother no longer buys bread or cakes for us, and the novelty of bakery cakes in the past has long been diluted by time. Buying delicious cakes or pastries and sharing them with her has become my pleasure. Now I buy cakes because ordinary snacks can no longer satisfy me, and unique cakes have become the beauty of the times under the exaggeration of the capitalist market. I don’t know if it’s because of my childhood experience, but I’m always reluctant to spend a lot of money on expensive cakes. When I want to eat them, I’ll just go to an ordinary bakery and buy a small cake that’s no bigger than a dozen mosquitoes. Sometimes I see women around me struggling with whether to skip lunch in order to balance the calories and consumption of a brand-name cake. Although I can understand the chemical effect caused by the soft cake rolling in the mouth, I can't help but admire this kind of combination. With a rational and irrational view of consumption, it is no wonder that scholars want to study the delicate consumer psychology of women.

Regarding eating cake, I found that it was the maturation and manifestation of my inner feminine qualities. Taoism regards Tai Chi as the most primitive state of the universe, which appeared after the chaotic period (Wuji) when Yin and Yang were not separated. It illustrates the ideal state of harmonious balance of Yin and Yang. The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon tells that Yin and Yang are the foundation for the operation of all things: "Yin and Yang, It is the way of heaven and earth, the order of all things, the parent of change, the origin of life and death, and the home of the gods. "In every relationship, whether it is homosexual or heterosexual, yin or yang, we are pursuing to complete ourselves. The missing part, and for discussions about the innate lack of yin or yang, you can also refer to the scripture in the Bible where God took out the man's rib to create a woman when he created man. This confirms our lifelong pursuit of the balance of yin and yang. Falling in love with someone is actually connecting an invisible two-way water pipe with her/him. By selectively letting the water pipe leak, we get nourishment from the other person's water, allowing these foreign substances to dissolve into our bone marrow. Until the body can no longer dissolve the other party's nutrients, or when the other party's body signals a revolt, the water pipe will burst.

In a patriarchal society, we generally regard strength, bravery, toughness, leadership, etc. as masculine traits, and tenderness, vulnerability, acceptance, sensibility, obedience, etc. as feminine traits.

I can no longer remember whether A likes cakes. The memory is hidden in a house in the foggy forest and can never be found again. But she likes all the desserts. She said that sweetness should be tasted with a person’s second tongue, just like a woman’s second stomach for dessert. A is like my second tongue.

After reading the bread story above, you may say that the child "is in the midst of blessings and does not know how blessed he is." The child may take this as a reproach, but in fact it is also a lesson. Refined sweetness without bitterness will not be sublimated. Putting the suffering of the family at the back of my head, A gave me the second tongue to perceive the world. It was my birthday, and she said she wanted to give me a surprise. After I closed my eyes, I opened them and she brought me a homemade cake. Also, there were tears on my face. I said, silly girl, why is she crying? She said she was grateful, thanking my mother for bringing me into this world and sharing the sweetness and suffering of life with her. This was the first time a girl burst into tears in front of me, and I cried when she talked about it.

Her palm rested on the back of my hand, heavier than a stone. We were sitting in a fast food restaurant that night, and she talked about the responsibilities she shouldered in detail. Tears almost drowned her, and the state of passionate love opened the door to her confidant. I knew that the sweetness she tasted reminded her of pain. Even though I studied psychology, when I was young, I still didn’t know how to explain people who suffered in their fate. I also felt guilty for my own existence, so I could only say to try the cake quickly. It was a brownie. She smiled with tears in her eyes and said that it was the first dessert she made for a boy. My sister gave it to me because she said it was delicious. I ate it with gusto and her face filled with tears. I quickly said it was delicious. She who was sitting across from me asked me to put my face forward, and sandwiched my face with her hands like a sandwich pancake, then squeezed it into "ghost saliva" and got it into her glass bottle full of suffering. That day I really thought that I had slipped into her world, becoming another person's safe haven or the object of a long-term relationship.

A is a stubborn woman, and our relationship has allowed her to sharpen the sword of her origins. To be more precise, she has found out her true self from me. Some people say that your partner is like a mirror, able to reveal the parts of you that you don’t like and filter out the qualities that you like. Needing and being needed in the relationship became the topic of our disputes, and satisfying and being satisfied became the pressure on each other. I didn't notice that fate slowly built a wall in her heart, numbing her emotions, and weakening the sweetness on the surface. My keen observation ability. She didn't want her lover to endure her suffering, so she hid her sweet tongue and became a woman with a strong appearance and independent will and free thinking.

Cake is somewhere between bread and snacks. You don’t have to look for it to satisfy your hunger or make sweets. Sometimes it’s like love. The world pushed me into a cold cave, and I was used to eating desserts for happiness. I actually expected to find cakes in the cave. A pile of warm bat guano hit my face, warning me that I was about to drown in the frozen river. . Looking for solace in the midst of suffering, I took it for granted and even demanded the appearance of dessert. My weakness was poured cold water on. Patients indiscriminately place the responsibility of being treated on their favorite doctors, without caring whether the doctor can heal themselves or not. They even mistakenly label others as "doctors", which in turn worsens each other's illnesses and creates a quarrel. Bitter melon flavored cake. In this love movie, we both played the protagonists of each other's story, until we found that we had fallen into each other's illusions. Like characters in a novel world, they were enveloped, controlled, and restrained by their own worldviews, and they didn't live like one. who. Times have changed, and neither of us wants to bear the responsibility of being lovers. Parting ways is a cruel decision we made, which is both rational and irrational. Shards of fate pierced the illusion.

Time invites her to walk into the figures of those people who have passed away in my memory, and disappear quietly. Just like the reverse development of Polaroid photos, I believe that one day this image will turn into white paper. This is exactly in line with the metaphor that adults like to say that children are born with a blank sheet of paper. "The world is metaphorical" - I don't know whether to quote Goethe or Haruki Murakami to say this is more accurate and artistic - it turns out that "born" and "loved" are superficially the same to us. You might say, "No, we have learned something else. At least we all know that we don't like to be bound by responsibilities." Yes, but it turns out that there are some people who can make you love so much that you can understand a lot, and then you can agree with each other like a dissolution of synergy, or cut off the relationship like an earthworm, and then you can still live with each other as if nothing has happened. Maybe this is the nature of life. The face of nothingness; you used various recording methods to leave memories, but you only captured her name and the process of missing her. However, the scene of missing you has long been buried alive by the stack of your memories day after day, just like outside the window. The scenery is as scattered and hazy as the rain. You seem to have remembered the responsibility to remember her. What is deepened in the memory is this responsibility that you have to shoulder because of love.

Regarding sweetness, I still remember that when I was a child, I liked to suck the corners of the quilt. I had no concept of hygiene and used my tongue to explore things like a puppy out of curiosity or playfulness. I tasted the sweetness in the wet corner, the sweetness produced by the enzymes in my saliva, and I tasted joy. My mother then scolded me and said that washing the sheets was troublesome. Occasionally when I cried, I sucked the sheets as before, unconsciously admiring the sweetness in the water, perhaps to counteract the saltiness in the tears. The sweetness you taste when you are ignorant does not know that the sweetness originally comes from the saliva in your own mouth. As a man, I always reject the fact that I like to eat desserts, as if this is related to the strength and strength of men, as if men want to say in front of women that they like to eat bitter melons. So I kept using my strength and bravery to exchange the sweet feeling of being loved from my other half, forgetting about the possible negative qualities in my body. In fact, when we talk about feminism, whether we are male or female, we should refer to the word "tolerance". Tolerate yourself and tolerate others.

In troubled times, I sorted out my state of mind, built a city wall for myself, established an order and screening system for outsiders to enter the city, and created an environment that was in harmony with my inner self. From the book, I brought wise men and sages into my wall, and I was surprised by the difference between the world when I looked down and when I looked up; through the process of psychotherapy, I allowed reliable souls to communicate with me inside the wall, and I gained enlightenment from my heart for everything. I feel joyful with my inner exploration; from the space of meditation, I lead myself to a pure and clean realm, and I feel enriched by opening my senses to re-understand all things in the universe. I can't help but miss the past, but more importantly, I keep the past in the drawer of my heart. I am grateful that it is one of the collections in my drawer. Qiu Miaojin, a Taiwanese lesbian writer who has passed away (she is one of my favorite writers recently), wrote in her "Diaries of a Crocodile": "Only healthy people are qualified to fall in love. Using love to treat diseases will only become... It’s more serious.” This sentence enlightened me and became a great motivation for me to treat myself.

At the same time, I was also reading the theory of body and mind. I often feel joy from the bottom of my heart when reading Soulology. The level of tolerance there can make you cry. From the perspective of the soul, apart from the body of the apparent world, we are all equal. There is no distinction between male and female, no age, no status. The word "great love" sounds like a "left-behind" move in this world, but this is the beginning of my discovery of joy after getting to know it. That does not mean to tolerate shameful evil at the same time, but before hatred, use higher wisdom to pity these people who are blinded by evil deeds such as power, greed, or jealousy, and then adjust the inner hatred, stabilize yourself, and use a calm heart. Find the most appropriate response. That is a lifelong practice. I'm not religious, but I believe these are the philosophies of life that make your life easier.

When adults say, "I don't know the blessings when I am in the midst of blessings," I actually mean more of the "blessings" that come from within myself. So I would buy a cake when I had nothing to do, without thinking about anything, and follow my inner needs - maybe this was the manifestation of my childhood desire for cakes - being able to eat cakes is also a blessing. The above is a record of my journey along the way. I hope that those who read it and those who write it can manage their "responsibility that they feel" well and live peacefully and well with their loved ones and themselves.

Dialogue with memory : It has been a while since I joined Matters. I am very grateful that the superficial remarks I wrote in the past that "feel far away from the author" still retain some matties (I hope the clapping is an indicator). Personally, I don't like to rely on social media. Too close, often thinking of writing only this type of article will scare away many people. Even so, I am stubborn and insist on writing this type of article! However, the new tag will write some longer prose. This is something I really want to write after reading "Mother on the River" by Ye Fu. It is a feeling of dialogue between the past and the present self. I like it very much. This kind of leisurely rhythm, like the mood of the endless night that is quiet and slow but rushing to finish before day comes, I hope it can bring it to readers, and also allow myself to practice writing long stories.