Fine China

An essay on falling apart in order to find myself together,

unable to exist as a single fragment, I must constantly search,

for what is the final piece to this discombobulated puzzle?

Candles offering scents that I wish would stop assaulting my nostrils,

as tears bleed down from the heavens of a world that died long ago.

Fingerprints all over my cracked-windshield, as my skin itches everywhere.

I died yesterday, or maybe it was the day before.

I didn’t really notice.

You sure as hell took no notes about what went down, or why, or how.

The softness of what once was is already gone before it ever truly begun,

and I hate the fact that the fear of what we do not know has so much power over our souls. Disregard what terrorizes you in the middle of the night and force yourself to jump off the cliff into the darkest of all lagoons.

Allow red-rocked landscapes to overcome you in waves as if the ground itself is a moving shore, the waves of what was once geologically sound incapable of changing back to its solid state.

For what are any of us but fluid beings? Changing in the night like fireflies about to be snuffed out, or to shine at a higher capacity than was ever thought possible.

His voice sings in the background, sweet jazz that smoothes itself over me in tones that make the words turn into touches, running down my flesh.

The question of self-worth, of, will I ever be good enough? constantly ringing in my head.

She cast that bell in the flames of the hearth, into gold and brown metal, a variety never thought possible to hold such a shape previously.

And cuddled up there at the foot of it all, at the precipice, under the cave, submersed in the bright blue waters, was everything you thought you’d never find.

It’s just that getting to it, finding it, discovering it, allowing it to wash over you in the way that it wished to, the way it was always meant to, just took far many more broken dishes with it.

Yet, when we sit down to dinner together, when it is finally, oh so finally just you and I, this day, this brightness, we use the fine china.

And you smile at me, and I know.

This.

This.

This.

This is it. This was always it.