Chipped Blue Tile

Time escaped me. I wasn’t sure if it was still night or if dawn had finally come. My body shook uncontrollably where I sat in the tub, curtain drawn around me, leaving the thinnest crack to see out. I hadn’t moved in hours, or was it days? Even the concept of measuring time had vanished from my senses. My body and mind suspended in a moment of terror, with all my attention focused on one small blue broken tile on an otherwise pristine bathroom floor.

I stared at the tiny square, three of it’s edges rounded by years of wear while another was missing. A blank hole of black in a sea of blue. Eyes tracing it’s every detail, around one bend down a smooth line and around another until reached the rough edge of the break. It was perfect and smooth, a beautiful piece of work with a single corner missing. That one chipped piece comprised the beauty of the floor and the structure of the tile itself. Yet it remained beautiful while broken. Was that me, this little tile?

Broken and cracked, the whole of my being fractured under a tranquil surface so no one would notice?

Damaged, but still strong?

I stared at it so long there was no more tile, the different edges of blue melding into the off white grouted frames and distorting into a blur. The black corner causing my tile to stand out among the masses. I no longer saw the damage of it’s imperfect corner, but felt it. I was the tile, only I couldn’t be fixed. Chipped corners can be mended or tiles replaced. There was no repairing or replacing me, though.

It all sounded inside, the internal rants of my shattered mind, but my relation to the blue chipped tile made more sense than everything else that had led me to this point. . . It made more sense than the attack and the looming possibility of death.

~J.N. Sheats~