The pandemic was a rough time for all of us, and I decided to go all-in by splitting up with my partner of 10 years. I loved him, but, in the chaos of crisis, I began to have doubts.
For years, my boyfriend had spent most weekdays with me in Los Angeles and most weekends visiting his daughter and aging mother in Northern California. With travel on lockdown, it seemed that he would have to choose. I was strong and capable, and they were not, so we decided he should go north to be with them. We told each other it would be a few weeks and said our tearful goodbyes.
With us separated, some big questions began to emerge. After a decade together, what were we if not family? It was complicated, but if we couldn’t find a way to shelter together during this once-in-a-lifetime crisis, were we really meant to be together?
For me, the answer had to be no.
Our breakup turned quarantine from what would have been the difficult experience of being alone together into something much worse: being alone all alone. I found myself adrift in grief, struggling with my new identity as a single person in isolation. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Or what to do next.
In normal times, I might have gotten a new haircut or started a gym routine. But quarantine had stripped the breakup makeover of its healing powers, because who would even notice? My colleagues on Zoom meetings? And in any case, salons and gyms had been closed for months.
So I got a dog. And not just any dog, but a giant, untrained Great Dane who barked and lunged at everyone and everything. He seemed both indifferent to my presence and terrified by my absence. When left alone even for a few minutes, he would howl mournfully. But he filled up the space my ex had occupied, and then some.
I also ordered a few items with the aim of remaking the apartment we had shared into my own home — a place just for me and the dog. Clicking away online, unencumbered by relationship compromise, I chose feminine pink linen bedding, sweet smelling candles, a couple of lamps to bring warmth to the living room and a tea set. My favorite purchase was a pretty blue sugar bowl, a $12 indulgence my ex would have hated.
I loved it from the moment it arrived. It fit in my hands like I had formed it myself from clay that smelled of damp earth on the forest floor. It was portly and perfect, glazed the blue of big skies and the wide-open ocean.
There was comfort in that bowl. I admired it every morning as it dished out its sweet nothings for my coffee, and it started to take on meaning in a way that can only happen when you have been locked inside your home for months, afraid to breathe.
The bowl became my pandemic talisman, representing gratitude for small things. It became a breakup talisman, too — an object of self-care and a symbol of putting my own wants first. It was a gift I gave to myself that was, at the time, everything I thought I needed. It was enough because I was enough.
The dog’s behavior leveled out as he began to feel at home with me. The howling stopped and we came to enjoy our daily walks together. Energetic and impulsive, he was a boisterous companion, but a welcome one.
Days wore into years, and the world began to edge back open. People could travel freely again and my ex no longer had to worry that he wouldn’t be able to see his mother and daughter. In this new world, he and I rediscovered each other and, slowly at first — and then all at once — came to agree that everything was just a little better when we were together. And the dog loved him.
We made the choice to start over and move together to a new home, a cozy Spanish cottage by the beach where we had a bedroom for his daughter to stay and a table for family dinner with his mother. A place where his things and my things would find a place together.
Unpacking from our move, I felt rising concern that I might have lost the sugar bowl. I finally found it on the bottom of the last box marked “kitchen” and immediately gave it a place of honor on the table in our new breakfast nook. There, it became the centerpiece of a mismatched still life: his orange cast-iron pepper grinder, our bamboo salt box and my sugar bowl in perfect blue. Even in that tableau of togetherness, it was part of what I understood as being the “me” in “us.”
Then I broke it.
Five years from the start of the pandemic, with my former ex-boyfriend still asleep in our bed, I reached blindly over the newspaper for my coffee and brushed the sugar bowl off the kitchen table with the back of my hand.
The dog immediately went for it, but I nudged him back as I picked up eight blue shards and a handful of sugar cubes from the floor. I would mend it, I decided. I would glue it all back together, and there would be new beauty in its imperfection; its cracked surface would tell a story of resilience.
As I rummaged through a kitchen drawer for some glue, the dog grew insistent about getting a taste of the potentially lethal sugar/pottery combo on the counter. His barking frayed my nerves in a way that surprised me. I knew my reaction was about more than just the noise.
But the sugar bowl was just a “thing,” I told myself. “Things” break. They don’t mean anything. They can be fixed or replaced.
Although, I had already checked, and this particular “thing” was discontinued. And damn, it did mean something. It was a small thing that represented a big thing: It was a symbol. Fighting off the dog and fumbling with the glue, I knocked the bowl to the floor a second time, and eight pieces became 12.
My partner, awakened by the commotion, emerged from the bedroom. The dog was still barking.
“Take him somewhere? Anywhere?” I hissed as I moved to protect the remains of my bowl from my now frantic, 150-lb dog. Clumsy with frustration, I whacked the bowl again, and when it hit the floor for a third time, the pieces turned to crumbles. A part of me broke, too.
Everything stopped. And the noise that came out of my chest then was guttural and deep. It echoed the scream I made 20 years earlier in the moments after I found out my father had died. It was a cry of loss and mourning so loud that the roofers next door paused their nailing.
“I’m OK. I’m OK. I’m OK,” I shouted.
But I wasn’t OK. At all. My dog, now more concerned about me than the sugar, thrust his huge snout into my side, almost knocking me to the ground. “Get out!” I shouted.
My partner, now well awake, put the dog on a leash and left without a word.
I collected myself enough to throw the pieces into the trash. Then I stormed into the bedroom, drew the curtains, dropped onto the bed and started to cry. Shuddering, gasping sobs for the shattered parts of my sugar bowl, for the shattered parts of me, for the earthy smell of the forest floor, for the big blue sky and the wide-open ocean, for the destruction of what had symbolized the “me” in “us.”
I had become utterly unmoored. Or maybe unhinged? It was just a sugar bowl, after all.
As I finally started to compose myself, I picked up my phone to apologize to my partner. And I saw there was a text from him. It read: “I found the manufacturer. A new one is on its way from England.”
I love my new sugar bowl. It isn’t quite the same. Although this one is also the blue of sea and sky and made of clay from the forest floor, its meaning to me has changed entirely. After the pandemic, the breakup, the reconciliation, the move, the acquisition of the giant dog and the accident that unraveled me, the bowl no longer symbolizes the “me” in “us.” It has become the “us” in “me.”
Jen Horsey is a motor-sport marketing and communications consultant in Los Angeles.
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