One-Hundred Days

The plate broke into a million pieces at my feet, sending ceramic splinters into my bare legs. Your lip was split in half, with blood dribbling down onto your bare chest. We were both bare in different ways, exposed to the glass and fists that rained down onto our heads.

I could see the way your bones broke through your skin when you clenched your fist. Your eyes closed tight on themselves but you still kept hold onto the air between your curled fingers and palms. I moved toward you, blind to the glass seeping into the flesh of my bare feet. I led you outside, as we both were, bare and bruised and bleeding, to the car where you found your way into the passenger seat with eyes still closed shut. You kept your broken hand in mine as I drove us to the hospital.

Broken pieces of human beings were resting everywhere inside of those white walls. I knew I was the only one who could see it, the broken limbs strewn about the chairs and tables and the broken off teeth lying on magazines. We walked further into the labyrinth of white hallways, and the broken pieces only multiplied. Frozen tears were hanging off of door frames, and arms swung beside them, kicking out the legs connected to them by invisible string.
Disconnected torsos laid on the floor, kicked like soccer balls by the doctors and nurses and patients. Heads hung low in shame, with mouths and eyes wide open in eternal screams. They were crawling towards their torsos and hearts on transparent legs.

You kept your broken hand in mine while I turned my eyes to you. The doctor's eyes stared at the bones falling from your fingers, and they hesitated before walking past us without a word. I kept your broken hand cradled inside the shaking foundations of my palms.

We walked along the dismembered torsos and heads and arms and legs. The hands reached for our feet while the legs tried to walk along beside us. The heads stared at us with their empty eyes and minds, terrified of life not in white. The torsos let free their beating hearts and laid them at our feet, a million broken pieces, stitched together with veins borrowed from those who broke them.

You took your broken hand and twisted the door handle, wincing and gritting your teeth into chalk against your tongue as you did so. The sad gray eyes greeted us atop a crooked smile of broken teeth. I let go of your broken fingers and cradled the soft face in my hands, placing my lips against the wrinkled forehead and choking back the tears that threatened to fall into cracked porcelain skin.

The old man smiled at us both and raised up his arms to the ceiling. He took your broken hand and placed the bones back in their right places. He took my broken smile and realigned the teeth and lips so they formed a perfect upward curve.

He was the healer of broken pieces, and he used the glue of hope to keep everything together while he himself was falling apart right before his own eyes.

We held him close to our hearts and held his miracle hands in our own.
As we smiled at him and cried onto cracked porcelain skin, he took the broken pieces of our hearts and made them whole.