Pieces of You
“There are pieces of you in my coffee.” She said softly as she shuffled through the kitchen in slippers and a robe.
She’d been finding pieces of him everywhere for a while. She never expected to see him at all, and as she wandered half-heartedly through life, he began to turn up more and more. She wanted him to be whole again, but for now the pieces would do.
Last week she found him in a pillowcase that had been at the bottom of the chest, forgotten. She nearly screamed as it fell from the folds and floated about the room for a moment. She closed her eyes and imagined she could see it caught on the wings of something magical, made whole before her eyes as she took in the faint scent that lingered there before being sucked up into the air vent above the bed.
Yesterday she found pieces of him in the hand of a stranger that graced her skin as they passed on the train into the city. She gasped as the fingers moved over the back of her hand like a song. Her eyes darted to his young, kind face as he looked at her, apologies pouring from the desperate seas behind his black framed glasses. She smiled wistfully at the eyes that didn’t match the touch and let her mind float away to the places where the hands and eyes matched perfectly.
Nearly a month ago she found pieces of him in the bottom of a puddle on the walkway leading to her front door. The sun was beginning to set and as it hit the puddle it shimmered for a second; perfect lines in a shade of fading gray and his eyes caught hers. She stood bent, gazing for a long moment lost in a time that he looked at her with fathoms of something that was shaped like love.
Today he floated about in her coffee cup. As she pressed her lips to the rim she took him in. It was the salty sweet that lay on his mouth the first time that it found hers so many years before, under a star-lit sky. There in her worn-out slippers and bathrobe she sewed him back together in her mind. She laced him up with the good parts of him, the parts that smelled of sweet earth and felt of a strangers touch. She sat in his recliner starring down at a half empty coffee mug and spoke in lovely, short phrases to the pieces of him that she’d never have again.
