dont hurt me
when i cook with eggs, I’m careful. I break them in one fell swoop on the side of the bowl, emptying shells and cradling them in warm hands, allowing them a last moment intact before they’re discarded. But an untrained hand knows no courtesy--it taps too many times, too hard or soft. The result is the same; a splintered web of white calcium that falls apart, plastering its shattered self against the palms.
The shells are too innocent--their fate’s a deterministic one, laid out by the one who cradles them from their carton. Whether their execution be quick and painless or agonizing and graphic is entirely up to that set of hands.
How can you tell a good set of hands from a novice’s? Is it the way the fingers shake as they brush the side of your temple? Or the way they rub circles into the sides of your hips while he tells you you’re pretty, you’re warm, you look like Lily James in that hot, quiet stairwell...
How do you tell if those hands are the type to shatter the shells against the side of the bowl when you can no longer see those hands? How can you tell when they fade into darkness against your eyelids at night and warm silence becomes the blue-eyed glow of an empty room?
and when the eggshell inevitably splits all the same, how do you fit the beaten yolk back inside? how do you fall to the floor and gather the pieces again and again, manically fitting the yellow and orange and white and sharp and soft back together into that perfect array of pure ignorance it once had? How do you erase the cracks and keep going forward when you can barely see straight enough to pick the shards up off the floor?
How do you hold them against your chest and pick yourself back up off the floor when those horrible, heavy novice hands and those sweet words and warm glances aren’t there anymore to help you up
How do you pick yourself back up when those promises he whispered to you in that empty stairwell never came true
How do you fit the yolk back in when the eggshells have been ground into powder underneath your own feet
How does anyone do it