There were many hims in him.
Think of a stemmed glass that slips from your soapy hands and falls to the hard floor, breaking into pieces and scattering. Most fragments are found nearby but some are lost beneath a fridge or are so tiny they remain invisible until, days later, your bare foot finds one. A broom will catch the bigger pieces—the segments of the stem, the large chunks of the side and the bowl. The contents of the dustpan slide down into the trash can, the large pieces settling atop the pile of garbage while the rest tumble down through the crevasses. Each piece is real. Each was part of the glass. Each an essential part of the whole. Now, though, the glass is gone for good.
The reflective-him gazed out of the window, mind wandering through the past but not arriving anywhere. The hour of the day—of life—had grown late. Lonely-him was the most defined: a steady state, an unchanging reality he had known the longest.
This evening, another him was needed. He was going out with a woman. She’d actually said yes.
A few days ago, colleagues at a work function had been standing in a circle. He was pallid-work-him glass in hand, standing to one side. To become collegial-him, he engaged in sports talk. He repeated headlines he’d read online about topics such as the chances of one of the local teams. This brought him to the table of talking men. As a child at the dinner table with his father, young-him rarely spoke, instead listening to his father mull over the regrets of his life. Each regret dropped into young-him and sat like a stone. So, with men, he preferred to talk sports. That way, the pile of rocks wouldn’t get any heavier.
The people at the party shuffled around. He found himself by the food table next to a woman who was standing by herself. He wasn’t sure which him to be, so he started talking about cheese. There were several kinds on offer—soft, hard, one with holes, another with different shades and colors. To his surprise, she took in some version of him, moving her head as he spoke. He reciprocated by listening to her when she pulled on the thread. They were conversing and as he warmed to her and she to him, a melody by Mendelsohn played its way into his heart.
He’d heard it as a child coming by his mother’s fingers as they crossed the keys of the piano. By then, she could only pick out the fragments of the Mendelsohn concerto she’d learned as a young student in Paris, but now had largely forgotten, having left behind her aspirations to be a pianist to become a homemaker. He’d watch his mother from right outside the piano room not wanting to disturb her, not really belonging there anyway. She was in the realm of the beautiful music of her youth, not in the house at all but away, far away somewhere he could never reach.
The heart of the woman by the cheese table seemed open, so bold-him asked her if she wanted to join him at a Mendelsohn concert that weekend. She’d love to.
This night over dinner before the concert, he could see how beautiful she was. At the office event, he hadn’t noticed what she looked like or how she’d applied her makeup or the outfit she’d chosen. He hadn’t really seen her because he couldn’t really see himself.
But now, over the course of the evening during which the sound of Mendelsohn’s Song Without Words filled the hall, an unexpected guest emerged—attractive-him. That’s how he felt because of her, Was this the whole him? The real him? He had no idea. It didn’t matter.
Of course, a stemmed glass cannot be put back together but this chunk of him would do. After all, 2,5000 years ago, master glass blowers in Syria could take any chunk of glass and shape it into a variety of vessels for use by the Romans. You can just start again with a piece of yourself.
Photo by Andra C Taylor Jr on Unsplash
