Raspberry Iced M

“The Egg”

Once, I was whole.

A quiet oval of possibility
resting in a carton among others
who had not yet been asked
what they might become.

I could have been
sunny-side up—
bright and uncomplicated.

Or scrambled—
loud and scattered with laughter.

I might have chosen to harden,
to become something boiled and stoic,
firm against the world.

Perhaps I would have been folded
into egg salad—
soft, seasoned, nourishing.

Or dissolved quietly
into the golden chemistry of a cake,
becoming something sweet enough
to celebrate.

When you are whole,
possibility is an open refrigerator door.

But somewhere along the way
the egg fell.

I do not know whose hands were full
or whose attention wandered.

Maybe the egg was fragile.
Maybe the floor was patient.
Maybe the carton had one space too many
and someone thought
this one could be spared.

There was no villain in the room
when the shell gave way.

Just gravity.

Just a sound
small enough to ignore.

And suddenly I was everywhere.

Clear and yellow spreading across tile,
a fragile architecture of shell
shattered into moons and commas.

No one asks a broken egg
what it hoped to become,
and a broken egg is not a dream anymore—
it is a problem.

Something to step around.
Something to wipe away.
Something to replace
without ceremony.

No one worries about the egg,
only the mess.

So I learned early
to walk carefully –
to step between fragments of myself
without making the floor worse,
to tiptoe so no one would slip,
so no one would blame the mess
for the fall.

Living this way takes practice—
walking on eggshells
that were once your own bones.

And still
I tripped.

Not out of cruelty
or carelessness.

Just the simple human act
of losing balance.

My foot slid through the thin albumen,
shells collapsing under pressure
that was never meant to be carried.

And suddenly the room was louder
about the mess.

No one asked
if I fell.

Only how it got worse.

And because I was there,
and because I was capable of kneeling,
the mess became mine.

So I cleaned it.
Napkins, spray, careful hands.

For a while I sat there
watching the stubborn shine of yolk
cling to the floor
thinking about how eggs,
once broken,
do not get second chances.

They do not become whole again.

They go to the trash.

And so did I.

Folded quietly into a bag
with coffee grounds
and wilted lettuce
and yesterday’s forgotten bread.

A place for things
that had failed their original purpose.

I thought that was the end of it.

But the strange mercy of the world
is that no one’s story ends in the trash.

The bag was lifted.

The truck arrived.

The city carried us away
to a wide and patient, freshly-planted field
where broken things
have permission to become something else.

There, beneath sun and rain
and the quiet labor of time,
the mess softened.

The shell crumbled into powder.
The yolk surrendered its gold.
The stench of failure
turned slowly into soil.

And I realized something
no kitchen ever teaches an egg:

We are not meant
to stay whole forever.

Even broken,
even discarded,
even misunderstood—

I was still part of the work of growing.

Not breakfast.

Not dessert.

Something larger than either.

Because somewhere above that dark earth
roots are drinking
what my brokenness can provide.

And the strange truth of it is this:

Nothing grows
without something first
being broken open.