Broken
A few years back I was seeing this girl, Yuki, from Toronto. She was sweet and pretty, a mother of three, but a little younger than me and studying to become a dental hygienist. She was also a kitsune which, though it presented some interesting challenges, has no bearing on the present narrative. Regardless, we wound up sleeping together for a short time and because of the basic hardwiring inherent in the psyche of both woman and fox, I think, she considered leading the relationship down a more serious track. Her lapse of reason did not last long, and toward the end of our “understanding,” she said something to me that, as I look back on it now, was startling in terms of its simplicity, truth, and unintentional cruelty.
“Ken,” she said, as we sat on the faded leather sofa that slouched in my otherwise bare living room, and pausing to make sure that she had my attention, she gave a light tap to the slim cigarette that dangled from her fingers. The smoke from its tip, white with the faintest hint of blue, trickled upward to swirl lazily above as we sat facing one another, each in a lotus position. “Ken,” she repeated a little more firmly, and gazing at me with eyes that were the charcoal-gray of Mount Yōtei in shadow, continued, “I used to wonder why it is that you’re still single, but I’ve figured it out.”
I loved those eyes. And her eyebrows, bone-white and matching the short mane that framed her delicately shaped features, were so finely sculpted that a bonsai-ka would have wept to see such unattainable perfection. But I did not rise to the bait and a heavy blanket of silence settled upon us. Instead, shifting my legs slightly to ease a knot, I took a healthy swallow from the whiskey-ditch I’d made in my one and only mug, a badly chipped ceramic affair bearing the motto neko no te demo karitai, before returning the drink once more to its cradle between my pajama-clad thighs.
The moment stretched, mochi-like, while she exhaled a plume of smoke through plum-tinted lips. It billowed upward and, as I tilted my head back to watch it roll languidly over our heads, a half-remembered phrase floated through my mind: as above, so below. The words weren’t quite right, but close, hinting at some subtler truth traced in silvery lines among the white-blue haze churning sluggishly overhead, and I knew that, if I could focus my eyes in just the right way, I might catch a glimpse of the koan written there.
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“You’re broken,” she said, dropping the words into the stillness… small flint shards knifing into a shallow pool.
I remained silent, aside from an audible gulp of whiskey, and let my chin fall to my chest, feeling the ripples wash over me and then gently recede.
She leaned closer, resting one porcelain hand atop mine, her slender fingers curling over the rim of the mug, and peered up through a snowy veil of bangs into my bloodshot eyes. “Broken inside, I mean,” she continued.
“I know what you meant,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply, and dragged my hand free of her grasp, careful not to spill the pale amber liquid. Turning the mug slowly in my hands, I focused on the web of hairline fractures spreading along the handle and wondered where I might find another.
