Broken Pieces


I broke a plate this morning and it felt good to smash it on the floor, to feel a morbid satisfaction from seeing it breaking into pieces (for a fraction of a second I thought it wouldn’t break). It was a moment of culmination that brought us back to our senses and stopped the fight when it barely started. Too bad it happened to be a plate from a brand new set so the remorse lingers: why I couldn’t I have picked out some old cracked bowl?!

I’ve broken enough plates in this relationship and the act always brings relief, inexplicable redemption; it’s like a period at the end of a long and confusing sentence when you run out of places to put commas. A timely explosion, a rather welcoming meltdown that prevents something bigger from breaking: it’s buried inside, so fragile and weak, but you’d rather break a brand new plate than let the fury in, than expose yourself to its demolishing power.

He said, “All your life is broken…” but in a calm voice now, since the crashing sound abruptly made screaming irrelevant for both of us. And he busied himself with cleaning the mess, which showed clearly that he took the blame. Unleashed anger can do more damage than we possibly imagine when blind rage sends only one command to your brain, “fight!” And before you know it, it’s too late and the words yelled out will be carved in both your memories forever and no amount of good make-up acts can erase them or help you pretend they were never said.

But he got it all wrong: broken plates do not symbolize my broken life or crushed hopes for happiness. I break them so as to stop us from breaking more important unfixable things. For a long time I considered it a coping method of mine but it does us both a service. It makes us both stop before we cross the line, it helps us go on unbroken. And maybe one day I will discover a less savage way of keeping us sane when we are about to lose it. But this morning the broken plate was the necessary sacrifice that saved both our faces.



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Problems exist in every marriage. So do their solutions.