May 12, 2020

shards

Something was broken here—a bowl, a habit, a marriage. Late afternoons, the tide
reveals how far the scatter’s flown—ceramic, a cigarette, a fragment of a shopping list. 
The waves pummel or baptize the rocks, depending on your mood, the seaweed 
a halo or a slippery slope. You are supposed to live your life as if it were a miracle,
and you have touched that place, after loss has wound its way toward an innocence
softened by despair. You have emerged, shiny and wide-eyed. Not new, of course—
altered. But it is impossible to sustain. You return to your own ordinariness, pacing 
the world metronomically. So maybe that’s why you keep going back, searching among 
the ruins. Not because you believe a jewel will wash up—perfect, intact—but because 
the shards remind you nothing will ever disappear. No one will ever really leave you.