Memories

It’s been almost an entire year since I saw her last. Memories from when she was here are all I’ve been clinging to. I can hardly wait to see her again. An idea for a happy post, originally filled with promise and glittering hopes of what we would talk about slowly drifts away into this smoke. Smoke that’s been plaguing us for almost a week now. The fires in the west are bringing all this haze, casting out the mountains in the distance and have finally succeeded in clouding my own mind. We can fight the dark, oppressive smoke but only for a time. I can’t fight it anymore. The suffocating mist has won, and I feel its sticky, oxygen-stealing atmosphere surrounding me, closing in and suffocating a bit more each day.

I keep going back to thoughts of her. Magically she appears and thoughts of this iron-gripped haze vanish. It can’t quite touch me when she is near. When life starts to crumble and this blinding vapor seeps through the cracks in my armor, she has the innate ability to remind me of my own strength. She is my kintsukuroi, my repairer, she reminds me that perhaps..in the long run, I am more beautiful for having been broken.

Kintsukuroi is the art of repairing cracked pottery by filling the breaks with gold or silver lacquer. The Japanese believe that the pottery can become even more beautiful after being cracked or broken. 

Voices from the past are back in clear reverberation. Their echoes cast through the smoke and hit me in the face like a hard, cold wind. My vision is blurred with tears from the blast, but I have always had trouble distinguishing the magical apparitions in front of me amid anguish and trials.

I can hear so many things, but I need to open these eyes to perceive the realities from the wishes. The realities from the imagination that lives so brightly, but withers so easily in this fog.

Reality will be so much better tomorrow, when I get to rest my head in the oasis that is the constant friend in my life. My dear friend, finally returned from a year away, at the exact moment when I need her the most. Until I can physically see and hear her, she remains the same magical apparition inside the darkness when I close my eyes.