Make_____

I found another piece today. On the sidewalk.  It’s iridescent, like the inside of a seashell.  Perhaps, the most beautiful piece so far. I stuck it in my pocket but then kept rolling it around between my fingers until I got home where I placed it in the jar with the others. It’s small in comparison, the size of toothpick, a shard, but it’s true. It is the best piece.

Daunting task: to choose form, design, color scheme, to start from the beginning. To fasten them back together.  There are thousands of them, a horde of shapes and hues inside the big, glass jar, reminding me of my brother’s old marble collection.

These are the little pieces of me that I’ve found on sidewalks and rooftops, under pillows, next to piles of books left on the stoops of brownstones, behind the reflections in shop windows and neon signs, in emptied dryers beneath the last warm sock, beside coffee mugs, and between couch cushions.

It was so easy to lose them.

But finding them has taken years.

And piecing them together without imposed direction—it’s enough to make me stare at the looming jar indefinitely, years streaming by in the foreground.

I shake the jar, let the pieces clink against the glass, jangle down into place against one another.  Today is as good a day as any to spread them out on the floor and make myself up from scratch.