Going to Pieces

I found a piece of myself in the dryer, shrunken from the heat yet muscular and sweaty. It was my dream of being an Olympic gymnast, and all the power that nailing a routine instilled in me until it tore like my Achilles tendon, sudden and painful. At the coffee shop, reaching into my purse, I found another piece of myself. The part that woke up refreshed and ready for the day. It had tidy edges and smelled like clean skin. Later, I pressed that piece against myself and hoped it’d adhere. It slid off. There was no obvious gap I could slot it back into, no home it was missing from. More and more pieces appeared. At the doctor, the OBGYN, the specialist. The pieces of me that I thought I’d already lost had been more tenacious than I’d realized, little tendrils tying them to me. A perimenopausal Olympic gymnast? Of course that went first. It was absurd. I was never going to be in the same shape I was in my teens and twenties. I’d be lucky if I could get back to my thirties, and I’d never been lucky. My friend told me she was doing IVF, and a piece of me sloughed off onto the table. “What’s that?” she asked. I looked at it and saw my grandmother’s grey eyes and my father’s Roman nose. A face like mine but not. Hope I once had but couldn’t afford now. Cupping my hand around it, I brushed it into my purse with other pieces of me crumpled like old receipts. “Nothing,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”