I’m 60 next year. Sixty. And I’m still baking fucking sourdough for some grocery store chain that doesn’t give a shit about anything except their bottom line. Twenty years I’ve been doing this. Twenty goddamn years. I started when I was 40, right? Fresh out of culinary school, all these big dreams of an artisanal bakery, you know, the kind with the brick oven and the locally sourced everything, the kind of place people wait in line for on a Saturday morning just for a croissant. I had the whole thing planned out – the name, the menu, even the goddamn window displays. I had a little nest egg saved up, not a ton, but enough to get started, enough to get a lease on a small spot downtown, maybe buy a decent mixer. But then… I just couldn’t pull the trigger. (Like an idiot.) It’s always been the money, right? That’s what I tell myself. This city, it’s not cheap, and what if it failed? What if I blew all my savings, all that money I worked my ass off for, and ended up with nothing? The grocery store job, it was steady. Good benefits, decent pay for a baker, enough to keep my little apartment, pay the bills. And I’m good at it, don’t get me wrong. My challah sells out every Friday, people literally come looking for my specific loaves. But it’s not *mine*. It’s their recipe, their ingredients, their fucking plastic bags. I make the same ten things day in and day out, watching the clock, waiting for my shift to end so I can go home and try to bake something for myself in my tiny oven. Something that feels like *me*. And now… now it’s too late. I’m too old to start a business from scratch. My back hurts, my feet ache, and honestly, the thought of trying to get a loan or deal with landlords or market myself, it just exhausts me. The passion, it’s still there, like a little ember, but it’s buried under so much… regret, I guess. I just keep thinking about that little shop, the one that never opened. The smell of fresh bread, the sound of people laughing, the pride of seeing my name on the sign. And all I have now is the smell of industrial yeast and the same boring fucking fluorescent lights. Sometimes I just want to scream. Or cry. Or maybe just bake something so damn good it makes me forget everything else for a minute.