A broken pot repeats

 

27 August 2022

Not to make the war a decoration, as it fades from the front view, like men and boys leaping from a bridge in Hilo, framed by the bus’s windshield, its fare altar. All I see some days is suffering. The self-love of selfies, professional announcements, the pain of succeeding when you think yourself unworthy. But that’s hardly the loss of limb or nation, though it might start there. The Israeli psychologist teaches mindfulness to refugees. Just ten minutes of peace: vacation from exile, that horrible tourism. A small child sang us from Hilo to Honolulu yesterday, “Mommy” and “Daddy” to the tune of happy birthday, occasional shrieks. On the other side of the aisle, an Asian woman with white hair clutched a bunch of bright red anthuriums. The couple next to me were going to visit Pearl Harbor. The man hated Jim Jordan and people who push ahead and out of the plane. I like your shirt, I say to the man at Times, but I can’t remember what it said. I sat between a woman speaking Samoan into her phone, and another woman speaking the language of frail parent on hers.

From her window in Kyiv she sees large apartment buildings; each day she takes a short walk to work out, drinks her war coffee, and sends out tweets. The streets of Kyiv are nearly as lively as those of Paris, 1915. Giddy and dark with the knowledge of suffering nearby. If they don’t watch their televisions, and we do, we find ourselves closer to the conflict than they are. (Leave out the air raids.) Geography collapses like a shelf of fresh lava. Watch the sunrise over the caldera and up Mauna Loa, I tell the tourists. “We’re going to see the volcano now,” they say that mid-afternoon at Lava Rocks Cafe.

Lilith’s head rests in the crack of the couch, eyes closed, ears up. Yesterday, two young women, one in pink the other in white, got out of a white Chevy SUV and asked to pet “him.” They wore name-tags that marked them as “Sisters.” I declined to hear about our lord Jesus Christ, but wished them well. On our way back, we saw them with another woman, another dog.

Kintsugi unfractures the pot with gold. You can still see the break, but it’s more beautiful than the unbroken. They’ll switch out the wilting flowers soon, because there’s no fixing them. I prefer dead hydrangeas to the loud blue ones, the lace of brown leaves so delicately traced. These days I remember places by the photographs I took, or left. Photos as memorials for the memory obsessed. I want to remember what happened by playing it again, because otherwise it breaks.