The Visible Mend

A torn sleeve does not ask to be made new again. It asks only for the thread to remember the shape of holding. My grandmother kept a jar of buttons sorted by nothing — bone next to brass, cloth-covered moons beside sharp plastic stars. She called it her pharmacy. Watch her hands: the needle enters where the fabric has forgotten itself, pulls through a color not quite matching, and this is the point — the visible mend, the seam that says I was worth the trouble. There is a word in Japanese for the gold poured into broken bowls. But before the gold, someone had to decide the shards were worth gathering, that the jagged edges deserved a future tense. I am learning to love what is patched in me, the places where the original pattern frays into something stranger, something the loom never intended — and is more honest for it.