I’m trying to pick up pieces I didn’t know had broken away. Pieces that fell around me every time my heart broke. Pieces that I didn’t even know existed every time life disappointed me. Running through my hands and pouring out of my eyes. Things I’m losing over and over again and can’t even remember what life was like when I still had them, whole.
I am leveled by the picking up of pieces.
I am adorned in all these broken little shards of life. The way I used to be happy. The way I used to believe in love. The way I used to think the world held so much promise. The way I used to trust. The way I used to laugh. The way I used to relax. Delicate little jewels I pick back up and wrap around my neck and wrists.
Little pieces of hope that whisper “start again.” And so I do, with tears in my eyes. And every time it seems like there are fewer whispering their encouragement.
Every time I listened to a man tell me he wasn’t good enough for me, and then listened to the silence he left behind, a little bit of hope shattered on the floor around me.
Little pieces of desire, of passion, rolled away under chairs and tables. Not gone, but tucked away under more functional things.
The glowing and precious stones of the secure woman who used to live within me, who burst into flames as I burst into tears while my father took his last breath, and the ashes that caught the wind the morning they wheeled his body into the hearse. The woman I became the last time I saw him and knew that a warrior would have to take the place of the daughter. The iron in my fists solidified, and the backbone that formed knowing I was alone in the world forever replaced what used to be soft and delicate and tender.
Every time I listened to a man tell me my idea was wrong or misguided, little tattered slips of dignity fell, silent silk, to rest at my feet. And I left them there and allowed them to be ignored and walked on, to be stained and shredded further. I stare at them on the floor in conference rooms where I am told to take notes but never contribute, burning with shame for staring at the floor instead of standing up and raising my fists.
To find myself on my knees, blind with rage and tears and disappointment, scooping at the things I’ve lost with shaking, tired hands. Shouting at myself as I feel around in the darkness in my eyes where light used to live.
“Get up. Leave that where it fell; you don’t need it anymore. It was stupid to feel hope. It was stupid to love. It was stupid to think you could begin again and come back better. You broke apart because you’re weak. You should have seen this coming.”
And every time I talk to myself like that, a little piece of my heart turns hard and cold. Not frozen, no, that suggests the eventual ability to thaw, but a little less willing to give, to forgive, to let things slide. A little piece of my heart grows hard and cold like steel. I wonder when the fortress will be complete as I fold together those delicate silk strands of dignity and pull toward me the shiny little pieces of hope and courage.
Every time I spend a sleepless night sobbing into a pillow, I wonder if it is truly sorrow or if it is savage fury at all the people who failed me. And if the tears could turn to venom, perhaps I could melt down the world and rebuild it into something gentler, something honest. Something that decides to stay.
And every morning with bleary eyes, I sit at a table stitching a tattered tapestry of beaded love and hope into delicate silk strands of dignity and hold it up to the light, a changed and beautiful thing I can wrap around my shoulders. Something lovely and soft to hide the growing cold inside my chest that is spreading out into my ribs and filling my chest with a deep desire to shut everyone out. Wrapped in dappled silk, golden streams of tears, and little mirrors that reflect the light back out to the world I can seem soft again. I can radiate hope. I can pick up the pieces and be reborn.
And maybe one day if I sit in my silks and diamonds, the remade remnants of all the ways life went the wrong way and left me sitting in the cold, I will become soft with hope and radiant with love, and I will be looked at with respect. And maybe one day I’ll stop shattering and rebuilding. Maybe one day I will only cry with joy. And maybe one day I won’t be afraid to carry my heart on my sleeve. Maybe one day I’ll find someone who stays. And maybe one day I won’t so desperately need them to.
Joy, like pain, never lasts.
Hope, like disappointment, never stays.
Love, like rage, passes.
And I can armor my heart to keep it safe and wrap myself up in the life I keep rebuilding and carry it around like art, like poetry, on my shoulders to light the way for someone else. Even if that someone else is the version of me I’m trying to become.
Leave a Reply