Leah Raeder

Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.

I was so sure this was different, the kind of story they made movies and books about, but in the end it was just a summer to a summer, a dizzying breath of honeysuckle and whiskey and candle smoke, inhaled, held, let go.

We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.

Every time I opened my mouth, flame licked up my throat. I could have razed vil­lages, kid­napped princesses.