Kintsugi

A bound collection of whisper-quiet pages rests on my crisscross applesauce lap. Anticipation lifts their midnight cover and I spin and spin and spin.

—

There is so much in the water. It’s strange and humbling. It’s disaster and devastation. It’s hope. I stumble upon myself, 19 once again after 4 years have aged my body.

A blizzard rages outside and the transitory items I choose to claim in this world sit—immobile—in a grocery bag between the garage and cold ground. Amelia stands so far from me, her spine intact in this harsh world. I’d like to say there is nothing in me to sway the finality of winter in her eyes, needles defiantly upright and green, but I could have avoided this collision.

Sand falls between the cracked tar on my lips. To lie down with guilt, no, sadly, no. I take pleasure in my lies with serpentine bliss.

My pockets find themselves with the companionship of penny and paper clip, cool air and lint. Is this to be my key moving forward, I wonder. Holding on to myself under the falling snow, soul heavy and yet curious by a world that does not owe or own, there was never any other choice.

Home waits for me fifteen minutes away. The smell of him entices me to dance with dreams.

Oh, but to be touched by this man is to be a flower in tender care, caressing me to forget that the sight of him may lead to another empty portrait of the forever I picture between us. I hush myself. “Take this chance.”

Love does not shackle itself to outcome. Here I was, though, another year with the why and the how of my decisions loaded into a revolver of uncertainty. Roulette is not a game to play in winter. And love does not shackle itself to outcome. I find my fingers marionetting these words with deep naivety. Because the car at my back is important in this story. It is my why. It is my how.

Cosmic witchcraft tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Take this chance.”

So I drive back to the hotel room.

—

Green velvet chairs roll across the tiles in my mind; a girl-woman with mystery in her bones once sat in a green velvet chair, one with golden legs and so much room. She now curls around stone, unresponsive, without breath enough to call for him. “Here. Take this chance.” Though it is not her cosmic friend who speaks, she surrenders even so.

—

From hotel to home to silence and back again, we became vessels for chaos as the years bore memory of each and every inhale, exhale, every second of ethereal congruence; our hands splayed open upon a mirror of secret wishes by earth and candlelight. There are many ways humanness experiences and describes, “this hurts.” Still, there exists enough soft power in its vulnerability to inspire a king to his knees.

So I drive—in—through shadows of catalyst at this point in the current, silence guiding me.

—

Slowly, over the course of several days, a final number settles in a graveyard I call bank account. $20,000: salute and sendoff, sadness and regret.

“Why? How? Why is he—”

—

These questions never find purchase in peace. They decay and wither to be forgotten in one season only to find reason upon reason to come alive in another. I’m not sure how tragedy befalls a soul who lives with simple needs, and simple actions, and simple love. To have her youth become a toy weighed at the gate of caprice, as if whimsy means deciding what t-shirt to wear that day, shouldn’t be digested well. It should feel wrong. It is wrong.

—

Stomach churning, I drive into midnight pools, even so, and I spin.