One day after some particularly intense decoupage, I looked down and noticed my hands. Noticing Things had become a major pastime of mine. I’d noticed, recently: that coffee was warm, that sunlight was bright, and that I felt sad. This morning, I noticed my hands and had a thought that had become increasingly frequent in recent years: my mother was right. This time, she was right about the hands themselves. They were exactly her hands. The brittle, nubby nails and the too-long-to-be-stubby, too-short-to-be-elegant length of the fingers, the soft knuckles and small palms.
My mother pointed this out often in my teen years, gasping and holding up her hand against mine. “Look at that,” she’d say, as if suddenly remembering that this person in her kitchen was someone she’d made with her own body. “There they are.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I was very busy deciding how to get my hands and the rest of me looking as terrible as possible, using Wite-Out as nail polish and scribbling absolute nonsense all over my arms and palms so that a boy who talked about pop punk too much might one day talk too much about pop punk to me. I hadn’t paid enough attention to that or anything else my mom had said when I was young.
And so, that night, I wrote her an email. It was long and emotional and mostly about our hands. I told her I loved seeing mine and remembering they were hers too—that she had made them and, with her own hands, had raised me and fed me and shaped me into a person. As I wrote it, I imagined her being moved by my honesty, my eloquence and gratitude. I pictured her finishing the email, taking a minute, and thinking, you know, she was more difficult than her sister, but she turned out okay. Finally I know for sure that she understands everything I’ve done for her. I pictured her shedding a single tear. I pictured her looking up the word “inchoate” in a dictionary. I meant everything I said in the email and took pains to express it clearly and with maximum emotional impact.
Maybe this was the hidden blessing of a breakup: not “haha, so what,” but a new tenderness, an opening up. An ability to say the things that hadn’t been said but should have been. Maybe it was all worth it, the disappointment and heartbreak a crash course in sitting in my feelings, observing them without fear. As I’d recently read in a six-thousand-word advice column addressed to a terminally ill woman whose struggle with her impending fate I considered relevant to my current personal tumult, maybe I was sublime right now, walking in the moonlight of my glorious, complicated selfhood. Maybe I was a warrior. At the very least, I was a fucking great daughter. I pressed “send” so full of love and positivity, I felt it must be seeping out of my pores. I breathed deeply and went to sleep, smiling and satisfied.
I woke the next morning to a text from my sister: mom says we have to check on you, apparently you’re having some kind of breakdown.
Well-Meaning Conversations with Loved Ones, Truncated at the Exact Moment They Start to Bring Up Kintsugi
“I think the time apart will be good for you. You’ll find your way back to each other. Nine years is a big investment! There was a reason you were together. And sometimes, something that’s a little broken can be even more beautiful. Did you know in Japanese pottery there’s this thing—”
“Sorry, but he can’t get mad at you for being bitchy. He married you knowing you’re a bitch. It would be so unfair to divorce you over it. And it’s not official yet—legally speaking, you’re still his bitch wife who he loves. He’ll get over it. He’ll get over it, and he’ll come back, and you can figure out what to do with the posters or whatever, but eventually it’ll make you guys so much stronger. After I had that thing with that guy in college, I thought Greg would never forgive me, but we worked through it, and now we only fight about it, like, once a year, maybe twice if we get really drunk. I don’t even think I’d take it back. Going through all that made us as strong as we are now. We went to this exhibit at the AGO, and—”
“Have you thought about couples therapy? I know he can be difficult . . . and don’t take this the wrong way . . . but I feel like being with you is probably not a cakewalk either. I mean that as a compliment, like you know what you want. I think if anything, I’d love to be more that way, but I also think it would drive Ade bananas and honestly might do the same for me. I think you should call him. He might surprise you. The other day I went to this craft fair with my mom, and this woman selling these gorgeous earthenware centerpieces told us about—”
“He still hasn’t answered your email? Men are trash. Every single man alive is a pile of actual trash. Why don’t I set you up with someone? My cousin is single. He’s got a decent job and he’s a total sweetie, and the only downside is that he’s definitely one of those white guys who’s too obsessed with Japan. Always going on about . . . actually, you might find this interesting—”
“God, I had no idea it was so hard to get a divorce. When Sammy and I broke up she just, like, took her loom and was out of there. But I guess it gives you some time to get super-hot and show up to sign the papers like, Sorry, who are you? You should get some big earrings. Also remind me to send you a link to this video I saw somewhere, I’ll have to find it. It’s about the concept that you can embrace the cracks in things, like if you—”
“Man, sorry to hear that. I had no idea. I ran into him the other day. He looked pretty good, I’m sorry to say. He was with a wo— Hey, have you ever heard of k—”
Chapter 4
In July the landlord started emailing. Someone in the building had told her Jon moved out, and she wanted to know if I would be changing the lease, for my own security, and also because the lease change fee was seventy dollars. I wondered if she was nervous about my ability to make rent. Our initial application had made us list our separate salaries in addition to our joint income total; maybe she had correctly intuited that Jon had shouldered more of our monthly living expenses, in accordance with how much more he earned. Now her income was threatened by the presence of the weak link in one of her mid-tier one-bedrooms.
I logged in to my bank account: I had $200 and a credit card statement that was mostly burgers. Instead of emailing her back, I went online, to homewares shops and clothing stores and little accessory boutiques I’d seen on Instagram, filling cart after cart, drinking wine and imagining the kind of life I’d lead if only I owned these items.
Sometimes I went practical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes extravagant. I’d conjure an important event—the Oscars, a second wedding—and craft the perfect outfit or bundle of accessories to stand out in a way that ensured I fit in more than everyone else. I’d decide an Italian villa was in my future and design a bedroom for it in the sale section of Urban Outfitters, ducking past the “vintage” items that threw back to my not-that-distant childhood in search of the perfect duvet to nap under while my focaccia rose in the other room. It was nice to imagine that owning the right nightgown could help, even if it would actually just put me in very stylish credit card debt. I hit “purchase” about 20 percent of the time, but still managed to rack up an impressive number of orders.
For instance: I bought a SAD lamp. I bought a posture-correcting harness. I bought a $113 candle, later returned. I bought new, humongous underwear. I bought a robe. I bought a set of watercolor paints, sat down with my pathetic little cup of water before realizing I hadn’t bought a brush. I bought a big, aggressive vibrator, then a less ambitious one. I bought dinner. I bought a ninety-dollar vial of acid to put on my face. I bought a sleep app and another meditation app. I bought plants. I bought a yoga mat, dumbbells, resistance bands. I bought an experimental nail polish. I bought Korean pimple patches in the shape of hearts. I bought a hair mask and a face mask and a hand mask. I bought little plastic bags to put on my feet and waited until the skin sloughed off. I hoped it would all be in one long, large chunk, like a snake molting, but instead it was like walking around on two open shakers of processed parmesan cheese.