The Kintsugi Workshop Where I Mend My Heart

Fiona McKay

Bring a broken pot or ceramic item, the instructions tell me. In the past, I filleted my possessions, keeping only what was whole.  A broken pot or ceramic item. Now, I have a few to choose from. I pick my favorite cup. It’s deep, and curved, the dark brown of bitter chocolate blending just before the lip into cream. When my husband threw it on our tiled kitchen floor, it cleaved in two, a curving diagonal break. The fault lines fit together perfectly. He apologized: I saw the light of anger drink-dimming in his eyes. Still, I kept the pieces.

    When I was a girl in school, our big night out was the Wesley disco. The rule was: no alcohol. But there were naggins of vodka everywhere—in tracksuit pockets, down the back of a low-cut dress: just not in the bags and backpacks that were searched on entry. The rule was: no leaving the premises. But the real party was always out the back. If a boy liked you, you’d go with him to a dark corner, get down on your knees and take him in your mouth, eye-level with the CK logo on his boxers. Girls were always coming back in, wiping their mouths and their knees. If you did that, the boy might kiss you, dance with you in front of his mates. Or maybe not. And avoid you at school all the next week.

    The instructor tells us about the principle of Mushin, and I like this concept of ‘no mind’. I try to embody it as I put on my mask and start to prepare the lacquer, my hands following the movements being demonstrated. I close my eyes, bruise my fingertips on the diamonds of a broken whisky bottle and press my fingers until the shards break my skin and bleed out my anger. I open my eyes again and find it’s the broken cup that’s in my hands. There is change: the cup was whole before my husband threw it, and now it is not. I centre myself, my cracks. I am at one with the cup and with the change. The sharp smell of the Japanese lacquer stings as I paint it onto the broken edges of the cup. I am the process.

    In my 20s, the rules changed. How many days before Saturday did he phone? How many dates, then, until we had sex? We bought flimsy lingerie in Penneys, Dunnes, or even Marks&Spencer, depending on how close we were to payday – stocked our bedside lockers with condoms. Said yes to having our wrists tied to bedposts, to having our arses slapped, our nipples pinched, our throats gripped tight until we came under the stars. And then sunrise left us empty, walking home alone in biting shoes. Waiting by the phone.

    This part is like a meditation, the instructor says. I hold the two parts of my cup together, hands relaxed but firm. Do not squeeze. Do not let the sections come apart. Do not push things, or people into shapes or places or things they don’t want to be. Let them be. Let me be me. Breathe in, breathe out. Mono no aware, the instructor tells us, is having compassion for this cup or bowl. Be the pieces of your bowl, your cup. Hold yourself together as you hold the pieces together: gently, in loving hands, knowing what it is to be broken, knowing what it is to be held. I can feel tension building in the pieces of clay—they are attracted back together; they are beginning to bond.

    I stepped away from my friends and went up to the bar. Started talking to a guy, as one does, waiting for a barman to see me. I kept waiting for the guy to excuse himself back to friends, a girlfriend, away. His pint arrived, and he stayed, sipping the creamy head through to the dark, bitter stout, still talking. I decided he was too good-looking, and would never be interested in me. I felt free to be myself. I had no objections to a one-night stand, but we didn’t have sex. We talked all night, like a movie. And the next day, he called when he said he would. He still mostly does, five years in and three years married. Mostly.

     I take the fine paint brush and dust the powdered gold leaf along the line of drying lacquer. Wabi-sabi, the instructor explains, is the perfectly imperfect. We embrace the value these objects have given; we honour the use we have made of them with our repair. We do not attempt to hide the damage our cups and bowls have endured, the instructor says; we illuminate it. The promise I make is with the past, the future, my husband, myself. I blow gently, to remove any loose gold dust from my repaired cup and cradle it as the lacquer continues to harden, making rivers of light as I tilt it this way and that. 

© Variant Literature Inc 2023