kintsugi
“It's like sugar,” I told a friend earlier in the day.
“It’s unhealthy and addictive. If you eat it every day,
once you stop, there is withdrawal.”
Of course, I know the feeling of withdrawal by now.
After all the meditation, surely I can detach from this rotten feeling.
I sat there looking at my parents,
"They only have so much time left and this stupid heartache is robbing me of this moment."
There was a crooner and an uptempo band playing outside. Old Florida retirees were drinking Bloody Marys at the bar. The fish taco tasted fickle. You’d probably ask the waitress, “What’s in this?” with some kind of grimace and we’d taste that flavor in tandem for the rest of the evening.
I felt a tickle in my throat, a hollowness in my gut.
I felt so absent I didn’t even process that it was the weekend.
"I think I'm coming down with something," I uttered out loud.
In the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, pottery breaks and is glued back together with gold, so gold trails appear running through the cracks. "Whatever is broken and put back together is more beautiful and unique than before."
In the end, it was all about your pain.
Your pain that I captured with such delicacy in a painting,
before I even knew.
But you see, I always knew.
Your pain sat behind the wheel
and attempted to drive us on a short and narrow path
filled with wayward directions
disguised as risk-assessing questions.
“I don’t speak unless I’m spoken to,”
was your clever way of hiding.
But you see, I am water,
qui dépasse finalement le bord.
I am the bottomless well
that recurs in your dreams,
that reflects back at you.
I am the abundant spring
that flows into the ocean
that you cannot control.
I am the thought
that keeps on repeating
when you put on your clothes.
I am a bowl full of golden cracks,
and tiny fissures,
like crooked tree branches
reaching up to the grey sky
in the dead of winter.
All the more exquisite.
All the more unique.
All the more beautiful.
I am here to tell you
that we can never be broken, darling
not in this lifetime
or the next.