I could be wrong, dear sister, about your opinions regarding the blue teapot. This, perhaps, could have been a precious heirloom-in-the-wings, a hollow relic awaiting grandkids to receive its sacrament. A story left untold.
You had placed it high above the cabinet, where it waited, and let the dust accumulate over it like a bicycle left in our old backyard after a sharpened flurry of snow. The enamel is somehow a sky-blue hovering over a sea-blue, the edges are speckled like a robin’s egg. There are unknown words etched underneath, but even I know an umlaut when I see one.
Did you buy this, I wonder, when we both finally became orphans at the onset of our own ripe old ages? After, when you looked out across your condo, pressing against the boundary of the hard-fought life you built for yourself within this terrarium. After, when you decided to disappear into the world. Had you picked this up when you traveled to the bazaar in Istanbul? Or maybe when you had traveled to the market of Split, where you had purchased for me the honey-rotten Rakja, even though you had long since supped your last sip of alcohol?
The paleontological record suggests otherwise. Perhaps this teapot has resided beneath the ash of your old life. Smaller things have served as patches when marriages come unspooled. Thinking back, I’ve never seen you drink tea, but this could be part of the fabrication we wrap around ourselves sometimes. Functional people with kitchens have teapots, therefore, you must acquire a teapot. People who take their divorce in stride have teapots; I suppose. People who bounce back fast, or even at all, have teapots. Perhaps all along this thing is your own personal tektite, frozen in the ancient mud, scattered from the impact of your life moving off course. Not even a teapot can bridge the continental drift between you and a family you no longer wanted to see.
So I held this teapot, dear sister, and thought about calling your daughter, even though you rarely did, who had already picked through the detritus of your life and salvaged what she deemed worthy of her sentimentality, who had already collected the old photo albums and the yellowed cookbooks and the wooden crucifixes. Clues for her to try and piece you back together. I could not conclude whether I could contain the entirety of my memories of you with this vessel, or even just my meagre guesswork. At the end of thirty years apart, even we are strangers.
The teapot is cracked, a final signature jotted down the side like a hastily inscribed sorry-and-sympathies card. I leave the door unlocked, as there is nothing left to guard, and leave the little icon by the curb.
Adam Camiolo has written about foreign policy and has been found complaining about public transportation in the local newspaper. He lives in a small seaside town in New York with his wife and dog and is waiting for all of this to blow over.