A Fable to Mourn the End of an Important Phase or Thank You Lumpz, and Truly a Good Bye

I was Humpty Dumpty and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put me together again. And then a beautiful boy named Lumpy, who came from barren lands, walked along one day. He was fascinated by the beauty of my broken shards and also frightened. He touched my back gingerly under moonlight but then walked away, and I thought I would never see him again.

Two years later, I had grown bitter and lonely; I had spent time with bad people who pretended to help me but broke me even more or left my pieces rearranged and all mixed up. Then, Lumpy came by from a dream in a dream and sat down. “How have you been?” he asked. “Life is hard,” I complained, reaching out an arm. He laughed at me and asked, “Compared to what?”

“What do you do in those barren lands?”
“I am a slave to machines. I sleep in a burning house. But I left to find you again.”
“I suppose it had been pretty stupid to be sitting on that wall,” I admitted.
“I love that you were up on a wall in the first place,” he answered. “The rest of us are content to stay on the ground.”
“Being on the ground is only normal,” I said.
“Normalcy is the safeguard that separates emotion from consequence. I am not so afraid of consequence,” said this boy.

I felt myself healing; I did not need glue or patches or thread or liquor to dull the pain. I was doing it by myself. My new self was not the perfect porcelain sculpture I imagined myself to be in the beginning; I was molded with bumps and scars, but I felt good in this whole shell. I was no longer a cracked pitcher.

“I love you, and yet you bring me pain on a daily basis,” he confessed after some time. “You bring me face to face with parts of myself I often studiously avoid. I have to go back to the barren lands; I have more work to do. I have to work hard to be free.”

To repay him for his conversations and his ministrations in helping me become restored again, I planted flowers in his dry fields, reds of all shades. We walked around and we named them all: the lightness of poppies, the thick of good wine, the blood of sunsets, a misty stripe of rainbow evanescence.

Where he lived was so different from where I was used to and I began to yearn for other places.
“Come with me,” I invited.
“I can’t.”
“Then I must leave alone.” I thanked him again for helping me rebuild. I walked fifteen paces then turned around, scared I was doing the wrong thing. but he had already walked three steps determinedly toward his own future and has kept walking since.