The Silence of Fractures

They tell me beauty is born of broken things,

but my edges still ache,

sharp and unforgiving beneath the gilded light.

This porcelain skin was whole once,

painted with steady hands—

roses that bloomed without scars,

vivid leaves without cracks to betray their fragility.

Then came the shatter.

A violence so quiet,

it left only echoes,

a thousand tiny deaths scattered across the floor.

They gathered me up,

not with tenderness, but with purpose,

pressing me into new shapes,

my jagged pieces made into art

too delicate to hold,

too sharp to touch.

They added butterflies,

delicate wings trembling as if they might take flight,

yet bound to me,

to this hollowed wreckage of form and memory.

I wonder if they mourn their freedom,

their captivity disguised as grace,

as mine is masked with gold and lacquer.

I live now in a glass box,

safe from the world that broke me,

but never far enough away to forget.

The light catches my curves, my painted blooms,

a masterpiece, they say—

but I feel the weight of the cracks.

Each fracture a story they refuse to hear.

The butterflies whisper to me sometimes,

their wings brushing my wounds.

"Is this beauty, or simply what remains

when there is nothing else to become?"

I cannot answer.

I am only a vessel,

filled with the sadness of what I once was,

and the silence of what I will never be.