Blue. His eyes were blue. Cornflower blue.

Wet leather, carpet stains, corduroy jacket with brown patches at the elbows. Weathered briefcase and creased pants.

Shaggy hair, black sprinkled with gray. Crooked teeth and tanned cheeks. Lean. Thin. Craggy. Complicated.

Love amongst the dusty tomes filled with the words of long-dead poets. Love behind closed doors, locked. Love, extra quiet just in case someone heard. Caresses flavored with guilt. Kisses that felt like despair or maybe desperation. His hands rough on my skin, searching, always searching for the familiar curves of a body that was not mine.

That ring on his finger, damning him, damning me, damning us and what we did. His tears when he thought I was asleep, tired, worn out, exhausted. Love that tasted like helplessness and felt like regret. Love that cursed itself even in the middle of its making.

I saw her once. His wife. Another four-letter word.

She. Blond hair, wide smile, eyes green with laugh lines fanning out. Graceful. Dressed in the soft colors of security. The whole to his half.

I realized it then. I had no part in their equation. I was the artificial construct. The Other. The personification of a youth too soon relinquished to duty and marriage and desiring to, once again, thrill. I was the sin to be confessed on Sunday to a red-cheeked priest.

She would be flowers on afternoons, jewelry just because, and dinner out with decade-long friends. She is what memories are made of, what the subtexts in poetry whisper of.

And he?

Of the cornflower-blue eyes and fumbling hands?

He was lost in his need both for what he couldn’t have and what he already did.

Our lives are never a measure of possibilities. We are always narrated as tragedies waiting to occur. Our mothers didn’t tell us what we could be but expressed once and again what we must not be. We were never told about the roads we could take, but we learned all about the paths we must not wander down. But in the end, their lessons made no difference. Ruin came to us even when we kept to well-lit streets.

Our mothers. Would they love us still now that we have turned into the cautionary tales they used to tell?

“Will You Walk into My Parlor?” Said the Spider to the Fly.

The Japanese have an art of repairing broken things—well, pottery—called Kintsugi. Artists use powdered gold, silver, or platinum to rejoin the broken pieces, making the resulting whole even more beautiful than it originally was. The art celebrates the form as a whole, history and all. Being broken doesn’t mean ceasing to exist or remaining broken forever; it means a chance to recover and reconstruct.

Just like the City of Beirut. Just like us.