Broken Pot

I don’t remember a time I ever walked past a broken pot.  Usually, I feel the need to put it together again.  Am an artist you see, and for us, there’s this beauty about brokenness. I picked this pot up and started working on its cracks. It had some sharp edges that put permanent scars on my hands. I didn’t mind them though, I would wear them like battle scars.

It took longer than I fathomed. I couldn’t call it my perfect work of art mainly because it wasn’t mine in the first place. It looked good for the eyes, but if you looked closely enough, you could see the difference in the types of clay. There was some purity to the clay that filled up the cracks, the one that put the pieces together. I decided not to fire it. Putting it in the kiln would make the difference in clays too vivid. Also, I wasn’t sure it could handle the heat in a kiln. It was brittle.

For some reason, this pot thought that simply because I had put in my sweat and blood in working on it, I would present it as the best work of pottery I have ever done. I would carry it as a trophy as my ideal work of art. Take it with me everywhere I went. Place it next to the fireplace, right next to the first painting I ever did. What this pot never seemed to understand was that I didn’t particularly fall in love with broken pots. I enjoyed every second of working on them never a moment of pure insane love for them. There’s this thing about a complete pot. Like its maker was bleeding emotion as they molded it into shape, its beauty as it was fired and this glow of completeness when it vanished. Maybe it’s because I know that it can take the heat in the kiln and not shatter. Maybe it’s because instead of complaining about how horrible its maker was, it took the heat and gave it a glow.

The pot got cold. The cracks started to show again. The flowers started to wither way too fast. That’s when it hit me this kind of pot doesn’t appreciate flowers. Maybe thorns would work, but I did not intend to keep thorns in my house. I planted some seeds and even those died. I let it sit around empty, vague. It had this stench of annoyance.

One day it pushed itself off my counter. I swept it out. There was not fixing it a second time. I didn’t want to pick up the pieces… I still have scars from touching certain parts of it and I didn’t want any more from it. I kept wondering why I picked it up to begin with. I should have left that goddamn thing where I found it. Probably kicked some of its pieces and tore it apart. I put what was left of it in the trash. Some things are not meant to be fixed.