Porcelain

Content warning: Mentions of suicide and trauma

I. 

It’s dusk, one early summer’s night. I’m in my car, parked on the little hill that overlooks the town. Through my windshield, I can see all the bright spots in the darkening sky above me, matched by the ones just flickering to life in the landscape below, like a boundary between two skies -- everywhere you look, all stars. Here is where the sun peers over the horizon as it rises every morning, just between the heavens and the earth. The owl that I hear in the faint distance flying and falling all at once. 

The dark has come in so fast I can’t see my hands without holding them close up to my face, but I know they’re shaking, the way a cá trê flutters on the butcher’s board right before the fishmonger guts it: a clean strike through the neck, all blood and then no pain. You told me once that in Vietnam, the fishermen that line the rivers’ edges keep their knives so sharp the fish dies in an instant, before it can suffocate in the open air. Sometimes, for minutes afterwards, it will still writhe on the board, the body clinging to life even as the brain is long dead. They say that that’s the most humane way to do it. That to die unconsciously is the purest form of surrender.

I find myself wishing I had brought a knife. What I have instead is a porcelain shard, hidden in the frays of an old sweater, a jagged and imperfect thing. I will feel it all the way through, every ridge and every corner. I roll up my sleeve, and in the paleness of the moonlight, my wrist is porcelain white.

 It’s dark now, completely. Perhaps that is the nature of light, I think: the way that it passes us by-- out into that gaping maw, the cosmos. The way that all the stars will burn themselves out, the headless catfish on the butcher’s board thrashing the life from itself, dust seeping into the crevices of once gleaming porcelain. That the truth of an ordinary and meaningless existence is how everything fades, one way or another, to entropy. 

The way the shard slots home and I feel something like falling. 

II. 

When I was growing up, your most prized possession was a porcelain dinner set -- authentic, you said, from the Victorian age, all gleaming white ceramic speckled with a pattern of blue antirrhinums. I remember you kept them locked in a mahogany cabinet in our dining room, behind wide glass windows that you’d polish until spotless. You’d never allow to touch them -- Không chạm, you’d say, every time I’d walk close to the cabinet. Not toys. 

Every Sunday, after church, you’d take the dishes out to polish and dust them, opening those mahogany doors with the kind of gravitas reserved for only the most priceless of paintings. You had to do it every week, you’d explain, or else the dust would seep into the pores of the ceramic and make it go brittle, and powdery, like chalk. Perfection required constant maintenance. 

Sometimes, when you were gone, I’d stand in the doorway of the dining room and stare at the porcelain behind the glass, those small perfect things, as if they might fall and shatter of their own accord. One day, when I was braver than most, I decided I wanted to see the porcelain up close for myself. Imagine it: a little girl, eleven years old, standing on her toes to reach the latch of that towering cabinet, fingers smudging the glass. I remember lifting a bowl from the top shelf, delicate, like a thief stealing wonder from a vault. I remember the way it felt in my hands, all smooth and impossibly cold, the lines etched into the surface machine-perfect. I remember how they were too small to hold it properly. How as I turned it up to my face to see the antirrhinums up close for the first time it fell from my grasp to shatter on the floor.

 I remember the sound that it made: a deafening silence, and all the stars scattered in a thousand pieces upon the kitchen tile. 

IV. 

In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, I cry and I cry.

V. 

I remember it took me the entire summer to put the bowl back together. The night it broke, I spent hours on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, scooping each fragment off the tile and into a paper bag. Later, in my room, I’d glue them back together: cracked and jagged shards conjoined with Epoxy glue, placed against the other just so. All the deliberateness of a conservator rescuing a Rembrant. 

It wasn’t a fast process. You had to wait for the glue to dry on one section before starting another, find out where each piece fit together as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. There were false stars, setbacks. I remember the times when I felt like giving up, when all that remained of the bowl sat on my desk for days on end, because the task of putting it all back together seemed at once Herculean and overwhelming and pointless. But one day, months from the day I began, all the cracks and flowers finally lined up. And it was whole once more, placed with utmost sincerity back in that mahogany cabinet in the dining room. Right beside all of the perfect ones. 

VI. 

In therapy, they make me talk to a psychiatrist once a day, in the office across from the room I sleep in with the lock on the other side.  Inside, it smells slightly of mildew, the chairs and couches an antiseptic pastel. The psychiatrist, Dr. Brennan, has a weary, sincere face, like leather creased from decades of sunlight. He says he cares about me like if I was his own daughter, and I believe him. When we talk, we don’t mention the porcelain shard, or the hill, or the suicide attempt. We talk about how bad the hospital food is, or how the San Francisco Giants are due to win the World Series because it’s an even numbered year, or about time, and the way it passes so quickly in front of us, that simple shattering thing. We talk about the way it pulls us apart. We talk about you.  

The appointments help. The more I talk, the more I feel all the empty spaces inside me begin to fall away. But depression is a romantic, he says. The harder we try to let go, the harder it hangs on. The harder it tries to slip through the cracks. Being whole again requires constant maintenance. 

After seven days, they let me go home. You pick me up, in the late afternoon. On the way out, walking to the car, I look up at the sky and notice, at least for a moment, that the world seems a little bit brighter than before.

VII.

The only times the porcelain dining set was ever used was for special occasions, like when it was Tết and your sister and her family came to visit. You’d make the catfish soup, the fish fresh killed that morning, and set out the dishes for dinner: all the unblemished, perfect ones, and my own broken bowl.

 It was not clear from a distance, this brokenness. From its perch upon the shelf of that mahogany cabinet it looked much the same as any other one of the set. But up close you could spot the cracks in the facade: the black veins running across the surface of once gleaming ceramic, as if drawing a map, crosshatch, posthaste, like scars dragged into porcelain wrists -- whole again, perfectly functional, but broken all the same. 

And the simple, unfettered truth of the matter was that no matter how careful and complete the repair, no matter the time spent or the attention to detail, the bowl would never be the same, never as pristine and beautiful and whole as it once was. How the little crevices, almost indistinguishable to the naked eye, would let drops of liquid through, just a couple at a time, and how if you pressed your lips to the rim the jagged edge would cut them, every so slightly. How as the years passed, when the time came and all the dishes were laid out once more on the kitchen table, the broken bowl was always the one that was chosen last. Because after all, nobody wants broken china. 

VIII.

When I get home, things more or less go back to normal. I go back to school again, and you go to work, and in quiet evenings over dinner we tell each other about class, or the weather, or how you saw the Millers and their new daughter in the grocery aisle the other day. We make small talk, exactly the way that strangers do. It goes like this for a few months, until we begin to break again.  

It isn’t any one thing that does it. It never is. Perhaps it’s in the way you’d catch a glimpse of my bare arm and purse your lips, turning away as to not meet my eyes. The way we try desperately to forget the sounds of shattering, or raised voices too loud for small rooms, or heaving lungs drawing ragged breaths, only to have them slip through again, the way dust searches its way through all the crevices, always, inevitably.

 And so maybe it is nighttime and I’ve forgotten to do the dishes for the third time in a week and you snap at me and our voices are raised against each other again and for a single endless moment we are there once more, in the time when I was sixteen and came home too late and you had screamed that I was a điếm and shoved me hard in the chest, back into that fucking mahogany cabinet, the latch coming free and the door swinging open and the bowl I had spent months repairing leaping from the highest shelf to shatter once more, and me throwing you to the floor upon the pieces, still only a girl but strong and tan from years of soccer and track, and our eyes just meeting as we grapple on the kitchen floor, freezing you with your hands around my neck, in one moment hateful and the next sobbing as you drove all the way to the McDonald's on Fremont to get me ice cream, wailing how sorry you were over and over and over again and me not hearing the words but staring vacantly through the car window at the vast endless sky, a porcelain shard hidden in my sweater pocket, thinking about nothing except the fact that in our little house down from the hill there were once again pieces of ceramic to be picked up off the kitchen tile, still broken after all. 

The next day, on my way home, I pass a little flea market in a parking lot off the side of the road, the kaleidoscope of crooked awnings swaying in the breeze. Near the back, past the thrifted clothes and the woman selling secondhand furniture with cigarette stains on it I spot a little old lady selling some fine china, laid out on an old beach towel. On it is a bowl, almost the exact shape and size as my broken one. It’s broken too, I see, telltale scars running up and down its surface. But these ones have been filled in with gold, the veins that run up and down its surface reflecting the afternoon's dying sunlight. She explains that it was repaired with the Japanese art of kintsugi, where lacquer is placed along the fissures and mixed with powdered gold. That the scars it possesses are not hidden, but contribute to its beauty. Cracks in an object, the woman says, are a part of its history. 

I buy the bowl and take it home. Later, in my room, I turn it in my hands, over and over again, the gold glistening, like stars. 

The next morning, I find you hunched over the kitchen table, your back to the door. As I walk into the kitchen, I can see the mahogany cabinet in the other room, its doors swung open, haphazard. On the table sits the porcelain set, fragments of the shattered bowl within another. If I look closely, I can see a thin layer of dust that covers them, just revealed by the morning light. You turn around to see me. 

Come sit down, you say. I do, apprehensive. 

You know, I never told you, you say. I bought these from Pottery Barn. 

And it is that moment that we forgive each other, once again and for the first time. 

Because perfection, after all, was never real, like the blue antihirrums, which exist only in the machinated engravings on the surface of the china, and nowhere in nature. Because cracks in an object are a part of its history, and to love is to shatter one another, and all the precious scars on our wrists are filled with gold. We are broken, all of us, but that is the most human thing of all, isn’t it? We break apart and we reconcile and we break again because that is what life is, this gorgeous catastrophe: The stardust from a dying star born again into a new sun a billion miles away. The porcelain shards that you and I begin to put together again as we sit beside each other at the kitchen table. The universe comprehending itself. 

We make morning coffee, as the sunlight leaks through the wide glass window panes, and for a moment, we say nothing.