• The vase lay on the floor. Perhaps though, for the sake of accuracy, it would be better to say that the porcelain pieces of what was once a vase lay on the floor. By now though, this fact is irrelevant. What is important is how what once was a vase became shards to be swept up and tossed away.

    When the vase was still whole, it made its home on the dining room table, about a foot or so from where it now made its final resting place. Lines the color of the sky in summer wound their way about the vase without form or definite direction. These subtle lines worked their way to a mouth that opened like a morning glory at dawn. The vase not unique: it was one of many that had been thrust into a market where vases were neither particularly desirous, nor paid any spectacular attention. Vases were as common and unexceptional as dandelions in an untended yard, and generally as unwanted.

    It had first been brought into the small apartment in the city holding a simple bouquet of red roses, and a little plastic cardholder. Found on a doorstep, alone and with no immediate indication of its sender, the vase with its simple and almost cliché arrangement seemed rather out of place in the dingy hallway. A moment’s contemplation brought it into the room outside which it had sat patiently, and set it upon the table nearest the door. A few weeks later, the roses were removed, the vase washed out, and to replace the wilting roses was a new bouquet: tiger lilies and heather. Admittedly, this is an odd combination, but the arranger knew that the recipient loved tiger lilies, and that her favorite color was purple. Lacking the floral expertise of his much younger sister, this common flower, oft overlooked where it makes its roadside bed, became beautiful in the arranger’s seemingly hodgepodge bouquet. This particular arrangement remained in the vase long past the point where its beauty faded.

    Several years passed much in this same way, and eventually the arranger passed by the vase every few weeks. Soon he was walking past it and noting its continued presence weekly, then daily, until he shared a home with the vase.

    But like the beauty of flowers, nothing in life is sempiternal.

    Slowly, over many months that passed, the vase stopped being refilled, though it remained stoically upon the table.

    Where once the arranger and the recipient would dine together every night at the table with the vase, these meetings became first more hurried, then less often, and in time becoming so infrequent that neither recipient nor arranger could remember the date of their last shared meal.

    The arranger still passed by the vase daily, but once the evening meals ceased, the arranger’s appearances with the recipient began to stagnate. He would pass the vase at odd hours, when the recipient had already retired to another room. Instead of joining her in that other room, he would often become silent and motionless in his chair, images still flashing on the screen before him, his hands resting upon the keyboard.

    They continued in this manner; the vase unfilled, unnoticed.

    Like the flowers that had once filled it, the vase began to deteriorate. Without being washed after the last arrangement was removed, a dark sludge began to cultivate in the dark base. Soon the vase began the transformation from an item of subtle beauty to just a thing, an object that neither recipient nor arranger would bring themselves to put away and out of sight. It remained upon the table: receiving only enough attention to make way for the many and disparate activities of the recipient and arranger. For whatever reason, the edge of the table was chosen for the days resting place, though by who is even now unclear. The vase fell; the elegant lines that once decorated its charming exterior were broken, unable to be reconnected. The mouth that once opened like the flowers it once held was now closed forever by months of slight. No more would it hold flowers, once selected with much fondness. The beauty of the flowers faded long ago, but the vase, while it had been whole, had an allure of its own. But this charm was noted only in passing, and soon was ignored and forgotten entirely.