Tile Floors

Here: it is, my life. In shards and pieces and scraps. Some the size of two cupped palms, others atomic dust, scattered all across the horizonless floor. Look. The floor will change as you survey the wreckage.  It is the grey and white marble veranda floor in Calcutta, the beige kitchen tile in Belmont, my red Mexican tiles in Vermont, high gloss granite in O'Hare, the clear glass of an elevator...all the hard floors I have ever walked. Hard floors where things that fall shatter and scatter and splinter and turn to dust. Always the dust. And then comes the wind, or the sometimes someone who scoops up some of the pieces, places them on a blanket, gives them a toss and leaves them to fall back down in different places. So then I have to check and check again to see what is where, if what was intact still is. And that is exhausting.

There is no direction in this vertigious, ruined landscape. And so I am lost in a tale of what has gone before, but even that is subject to the faults of lone memory; memory as untrustworthy as thin ice covered by snow. What looks smooth and inviting will take you down and trap you and you will suffocate. All in an unnoticed instant.