Pieces

My things look used. They are smudged and scratched; lumpy and deflated. I like my used things, though. They look vandalized by life in the way that life does to things when there is lots of it—lots of stories to tell. My body looks well-used, too; scarred and suntanned, a little muscle tone beneath curves that are soft and well-fed these days. Lots of stories to tell there, too.

I thought about them from the passenger seat downtown at midnight. The pieces of broken glass beside the median glinted so brilliantly in the headlights that they might as well have been as many diamonds—and why not? Why not call them diamonds if the sparkle just the same? Why not call it love if your heart is in your throat and your stomach is where your heart should be? Who gets to say, anyway? For a moment, from certain angles, they are diamonds; and for a moment—just a moment, from certain angles—I am beautiful.

But from most angles I fear I am no more than so many pieces, fragments contained within a human-shaped membrane. There are so many things that I am and so many things I am not and no one can see all of them at once; I am a broken mirror with pieces missing. Who took them, when I wasn’t looking? Who threw them away?

Though I am incomplete, lately I’ve been braver. I’ve been braver and more honest, with myself and with others. And while I’m brave, let’s talk. Let’s talk about how I’m tired of apologizing for myself. For being in pieces, pieces of El. Not one thing all the way through; full of contradictions and ironies.

I want to live them and love them—the pieces. The good and the imperfect. I want to embrace them, hang each one around my neck and wrists or from my earlobes, let them glint and catch the light. I want to adorn myself with who I am, and twirl in the sunlight and shine and flash. I want to live as if I was beautiful, to believe it so deeply and live it so vividly that others believe it too. I want to glow.

But maybe we’re already glowing. I think we are, living in this place where the music sounds like the weather and the weather is always changing. It’s a sensory symphony, as we hear and see and taste and smell and touch the world; as we hear and see and taste and smell and touch each other.

It is beautiful, and I am a part of it. I am a piece. I am pieces within a piece of a whole. The whole is beautiful, and though the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the pieces make beauty too, don’t they? They are what makes the whole full of beauty, beauty-full.

A piece of beauty.

I think I can live with that.




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