I know all too well what well-loved people look like. I grew up staring hungrily at them, wishing for a taste of the enveloping warmth they had the luxury of taking for granted. I can almost imagine the taste, if I close my eyes and let myself consider the possibility.

The only things well-loved in my childhood were my books, affectionately read to pieces by my own hands while I tried my best to hide away from domestic terror.

To offer compassion to a friend missing a loved one, a parent who’d passed on long before I ever knew them, I might say I know how much their parent loved them. They might ask me how I could know, a fair question. My only response would be to tell them that they aren’t broken enough to have experienced anything less.

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to live through all the trauma they experience. I wonder how we are able to get to the other side, when so many don’t make it. I might have finally come up with an answer, though it feels grimly dissatisfying.

Some of us need to survive in order to share cautionary tales, don’t we?

Oh, to be well-loved, like acquiring a precious glazed donut in a display case at the local bakery. The oblivious walk in and pay for their donuts and leave clutching those treasures in waxy paper bags. Meanwhile, the needy linger by the front window, eager noses pressed up against the glass, fogging it up, longing for one of our own and settling for the faint aroma that just might waft our way whenever we hear the jingle of the shop’s doorbell that means someone is getting that love, someone is getting that soft care and sweetness. We could be that someone; we could be well-loved. If only we were built for that world. If only we had enough wits about us to do more than scrounge for crumbs and suck in deep breaths to taste the scent on the air. If only we could afford it.

Unloved people know the taste of well-loved better than anyone else, if only by its contrast. We know it because we starved for it. We’ve spent our lives gagging on nothingness; we know it by what it indubitably is not. And we few cautionary tales who’ve managed to make more than a beggar’s go at real, true love? We eat very slowly, taking small mistrustful bites, waiting for cops or rats alike to accuse us of petty theft.

Ever so cautiously do we eat, for the rest of our lives. But oh, how sweet it is, the taste of well-loved. To a tongue that’s only known bitter before, oh, how sweet, nearly too sweet, but don’t worry, we’ll choke it down if we have to, we’ll savor every single morsel that lands inside our mouths, and we’ll pray there’s never a final bite, never a last bit, that it’s never over. To lose that taste would only be self-fulfilling prophecy, after all, and so we can only hope to keep this newfound sustenance just as long as the fates will allow.

Some of us just might be lucky enough to hope that, if we can get it right, the generation after us won’t have to fog up the bakeshop windows with longing like we did.