If This Vase Could Speak: A Ceramic’s View of a 15‑Year Marriage
I am a vase.
I was born in fire. Before that, I was clay, then a sketch on a screen. A man sat late at night, moving shapes around. He chose two cranes, a lotus pond, a soft pink ground. He was thinking of a wetland, a first date, a silence that had lasted fifteen years.
When I came out of the kiln, I held that silence inside me.
He gave me to her on an ordinary evening. She held me carefully, as if I might break. Her fingers traced the curve of my neck, the feather lines of the crane. She smiled, but it was a smile that stopped halfway. She saw something he hadn’t—a detail in the plumage, a memory.
“You remember,” she said.
Now I live on a sideboard in their living room. I watch them pass by. Sometimes she pauses, looks at me for a second longer than necessary. He does too, when he thinks she isn’t looking.
I am just a vase. But I am also the space between what was said and what wasn’t. I am the vessel for a moment they almost let go.