Kintsugi

There they were, all of them, or most of them.

“No,” she thought, “they’re all here. Nothing is missing.”

And so she began the painstaking task of piecing them back together. Funny, though: it wasn’t at all like the task that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had tried to accomplish with Humpty Dumpty. This was her effort, solitary, valid, valuable. And so she set to work piecing every one of them back together. It wasn’t an arduous undertaking, though, even if it wasn’t exactly fun. It was simply something that needed to be done, a thing she wanted to do. She was also the only one who could do it.

There weren’t really all that many pieces; the fragments were large enough after all, and the edges were broken in such a way that it wasn’t so hard to fit them together correctly, snugly. She had glued more than one damaged piece of pottery back together again, and knew this experience would help guide her. Above all, this piece was worth making whole once more.

It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be infinitely better and more beautiful for the mending. She knew this.

The colors also helped. There was quite an assortment of them, but the main ones were yellow, blue, gray, and green. The colors all were as aware of what they symbolized as she was. The blue parts knew themselves to be fragments of the sky and the sea, although the skies and the seas were not always from the same parts of the world. A person who travels knows such things and doesn’t feel the need to explain or even name them. It is enough to see them flowing through memory as if they were still paint wet on a canvas.

The same thing for the yellows, which came from looking up as well as down. They were hot as well as warm, soft and also smooth, blazing or muted, immense but also minute. You can never stop yellow. When it’s there, before our eyes, we can use it to punctuate the other colors that live nearby, that surround it. Gold, which in a sense is as form of yellow, binds everything together in kintsugi fashion, with wobbly yet definitive lines. It gleams. She had always thought of it as a smile. With yellow, whatever its form, there was every chance of success in healing the rift,’’ Since everyone knows that mixing blue with yellow produces a shade of green, it was logical to look to that color next in the process of matching the brokenness. It can be an unpredictable green, though, and perhaps that was the basis for its beauty, even if it had become a broken green and was in need of mending.

“Precious, glorious mending,” she thought, aware that those adjectives might sound rather elaborate yet feeling they fit.

She allowed herself to revel within the greens, which moved about the shards with all the joy of a summer meadow. The shadier areas were just as appealing and memorable as the sunny ones. She recalled the acid green mentioned by Rosalía de Castro in one of her poems from the nineteenth century. She was also able to detect the places where a green began to move closer to teal. That might be where there was an extra drop of blue, perhaps. Or was it yellow? Teal was like a mermaid, and just as seductive.

The pieces were coming together now, slowly, which was how they should. Some of the rough edges were disappearing. Well, maybe they weren’t exactly disappearing, because they were still visible. However, they had found their fitv and had moved into their proper places. It had helped to take her time, to inspect the edges carefully, without fear of their roughness, the danger that they could cut her fingers, make them bleed. In a word - kintsugi, perhaps - things were going well with the rift. Glinting rivers were proof of that.

This was not going to be fixed, nor should it be, overnight. No, she had almost all the time in the world. She was also aware that time was worth its weight in gold. Gold she had, too.

Among the colors of the pieces was gray. She hadn’y gotten to it yet, but she was not about to forget it. Along with the subtle color of ashes, granite, and storm clouds, there were other things that needed to be taken into account if the grays were going to fit properly. She actually thought - hoped or knew - that this color would serve as a frame for the others, as an anchor for the. She was more than willing to allow that to happen. Once upon a time she might not have been willing.

She loved gray, too, and trusted it. It was the color of her most loving cat. It had also been walks along two separate coastlines, one looking east and the other looking west. One meaning either the coasts themselves or the two people tracing them with their feet, eager to absorb the black and white veins in the rocks. The steps had - perhaps because of the rocks - lasted for many years. They might even be engraved on secret or nameless shores. 

She thought about how, once she had finished repairing the rift, she might return to see if that were the case. She suspected it was, and it was a pleasant thought. Not every step had been written by the sea with its many kingdoms; some had inscribed the oldest streets of Compostela, others grim alleys of cities better left unnamed. Those had been different grays, though, more like the doves of Toulouse and the cliffs where Cathares had ceased to exist. The ones in Compostela most closely resembled worn stone pillows, pocked, ridged, layered with the steps of too many who had ignored them. She had not, and these grays were all in the pieces she was mending to match the thoughts that were healthy and whole.

Now she thought she could see a bell tower called the Berenguela, as well as a Romanesque arch or two, hidden among the grays. She wasn’t certain, because they appeared only through the fragrant laurel leaves or sprouting up behing the biggest clouds of sky blue hydrangeas in the world. The scenes kept moving, some displaced, others displacing, sharing shadows and streams that had lived when all was whole, not held together by gold.

“This is a very slow process,” she repeated, but was not at all discouraged. Repair takes time, and she held it in her hands. She had already understood that a fragile vessel is not reconstructed in a day and looked forward to what was to come.

Silver thoughts among the gold. A bit like an old song her grandmother used to sing and had passed on to her mother. She liked the silver threads, like the ones she now had, and knew she would weave them well. 

[To be continued]