Missing

WHAT was missing? The cat was missing.

After we moved to Princes Street she disappeared. First of all she came home every few days for a meal and then vanished again. After I left she never went back. Perhaps because the houses (the old and the new) were so close, she went back to the park behind our old house and lived there, begging for food from kindly neighbours.

I don’t want to write about Izzy. She seems so trivial in the scheme of things. I don’t want to write about any of this any more. It’s old news, another time and place, far away emotionally, geographically and historically.

What I really want to say is it turned out okay and I’m tired of apologising for it.

I’m a broken, wounded, scarred edition of someone I used to be. But I wasn’t better in the ‘before’ than I am in the ‘after’.

In the ‘before’ I was a marble statue in a cemetery – cold, flawless and carefully crafted. It was no way to live.

Now I’m bruised, bleeding and raw, pouring out whatever emotion launches itself inside me. I am an escaped prisoner of war.

I see things differently through the eyes of suffering; leaning into the tenderness of human experience and softening with the application of tears. Spongy and curved, all the angles are gone.

Aged and battered like the cracked bowls the Japanese fill with gold. After the bowls are put back together with seams of molten metal, they are more precious, more durable, more prized.

A vessel exposing the scars of a life well lived.

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Tell me what was missing?

{photo by ghbrett}