We Are Fragments: A Memoir of Reconciliation with Self and World

Elisabeth Ivey

Abstract

I think that some part of me is broken. While others search for the light, I find truth wrapped up in layers of darkness, warm like a mother’s womb or the crook of a father’s arms into which I run. Some would say beauty emerges from the symmetrical union of two halves, but I find it in the splintered cacophony of difference that doesn’t seem to fit together. And I think that my desire to find beauty in the broken belies my need to find it within myself, for I am a piece of art rendered in pieces. With my right eye larger than my left, and the same for my feet, I am quite literally from top to bottom a broken mess. Yet I find truth in that, and therefore beauty too.