Kintsugi (金継ぎ?) (Japanese: golden joinery) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum a method similar to the maki-e technique.As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
PRELUDE
There was a place she went to, a half-formed, drowsy incoherence that occupied the liminal frontier between sleep and wakefulness. She was aware of its existence only in the fragmented moments of clarity that threatened at the edges of it, those times when she would wake into a darkness so oppressive that it seemed to thicken the air. In those brief seconds, as she fought the rising panic, as she waited for the uncannily familiar sensation of something cold dripping into her veins, she knew with absolute certainty that the mind-palace was a dream state only.
And then, sluggish and gentle, the waves would take her, tugging her away from the dark room, the sting in her arm, the heaviness of her body. She would close her eyes—had they ever been open?—and allow the warmth and light of the dream to absorb her. The doors of the palace broke apart, splintered with the grace and fire of late-afternoon sunlight.
Everything hurt, and everything was fuzzy. Those were the first two things she noticed: pain. Disorientation.
Even before she opened her eyes, the room was spinning. When she tried to open them, to ground herself, her eyelids wouldn't cooperate. She tried to wiggle her fingers, her toes. Everything felt weighted, like the time she'd been put under to have her wisdom teeth out.
She'd clawed her way to this point before, to the darkness and slow drip of intravenous comfort. But something was different this time. The blackness behind her eyes seemed less impermeable. Lighter, even. And the warm pull back to the tide of unconsciousness was weaker, barely there at all.
No, I don't want this. Don't make me. Better to lie in dappled sunlight on the floor of her mind-palace. Better to suspend forever in a sea of opiates and imagery. That pleasant, surreal world of metaphor and ambient light. Everything safe. Everything warm.
And Will had been there, hadn't he…?
But the details were fading, replaced instead by an awareness of the stiffness in her limbs, a slight but jarring pain in the side of her head. She could feel her legs now, knew that they were pinned in place by a set of warm and neatly tucked blankets. Her arms, too, were stuck in place, laid neatly at her sides on soft sheets. She opened her mouth, moved her jaw side to side, clicking. Testing. It felt weird, as if her face belonged to someone else.
She could hear someone speaking to her. The voice was distorted, not quite right, like hearing an old recording played through a dying speaker. She couldn't be sure where the sound was coming from—it seemed to be everywhere, to be nowhere. Directionless.
A man's voice, a voice she recognized.
He was saying her name. Repeating it, like a prayer: Abigail. Are you awake, Abigail? Wake up…
A memory. The slow stirring of it, cold in her chest and echoed by a renewed jolt of pain through the side of her head. Something bad had happened. She knew it completely, but the particulars were difficult to access—as if the memory had been cut out, removed. Dread clawed up inside her, crouched panther-like in the back of her throat. Was she going to scream? Could she scream?
Something bad had happened. Something terrible.