Breaking Dishes

Breaking Dishes

            You say once they die you’re breaking all the dishes.  The delicate blue castles on heirloom plates passed down to your mother.  Treasured.  Hand washed.  Tiny crosshatched detail so intricate, beautiful, antique.  You hate them.  The rest of it will be disposed of: you’ll rent a dumpster and throw out the contents too unpleasant to stare at, to think about.  Have the place repainted, put it on the market.  Leave the whole damn thing behind.  But first you’re shattering every single one of these dishes.  You’re taking them out to the backyard and throwing them up at the fence.  The argument about who was supposed to set the table. Smithereens.  The frustration of waiting till Dad gets home. Cracked.  The painful family dinners: the boring rants about work or tv only barely preferable to the conversations about how your daughter got a B.  Shards.  The subsequent argument about how getting angry, or explaining, or being sad, or being quiet, or doing anything will not be tolerated in THIS house.  Tiny little splinters scattered in the dirt.  Not thinking anymore in between the tosses, a stream of dishes flies at fence a guttural cry as the blue and white flies out like a ….. Crashing into the wall.  Louder than the music you used to drown out their screaming.   As you smash them the raw feelings that over powered your childhood come back to light sentences swirling like the especially tiny shards in the air: Not good enough never good enough.  I fucked up again. Would they have been happy without me in their own disillusioned fantasy?  Louder harder faster.  But it seems only moments after you started you reach into empty air surprised to see the stack is gone.  The barren concrete slab now a garden of bluebells and tiny porcelain white flowers.   With a sob you collapse.  You should never have come back here.  But at the same time… you can’t leave it here.  For better or worse our memories make us who we are.  So you sweep up the shards.  You sift out the dirt and put them in a plastic bag.  You’re never coming back here again.   But you can’t leave it behind.  For years they sit in the back of a forlorn closet. But when you get your own house you make a mosaic behind the sink: tiny pieces of porcelain past. 

A reminder of what you never want to become but also of how you became.

Author's Note

Suggestions on making this less agnsty?