If I had a beautiful mug, hand-painted with every color of the sky and the sunrise, perfect for holding warm spice tea and a silver spoon of sugar and a splash of milk; if I had that mug, which probably would have the name of some place on it and was found in a tourist trap and cost ten dollars too much; if I had that mug, whose handle would most likely break off and that would never be dishwasher- or microwave-safe; if I owned that mug, that spiteful, hideous, good-for-nothing coffee container; that atrocious, pitiful gift, that ugly, nasty beautiful mug, I would throw it across the room and it would shatter into a million pieces of ceramic masterpiece-turned-disaster piece, and hot water would fly everywhere, a Niagara Falls of tea, and I would say, See, this represents my life, beautiful and picturesque and wonderful and loved and yet a state of turmoil and the epitome of anger. People would tell me, Oh, how poetic, how symbolic. If you were a classic book, we¡¯d read you and analyze you and write essays about you and yet you aren¡¯t and so we don¡¯t and so you better start picking up the pieces of the mug because it isn¡¯t going to pick itself up and maybe you should glue it together again and have a cup of tea at the end of the novel too, for that would be coherent and a happy ending and so symbolic. But I would leave the broken mug on the floor, because lives are interconnected and when one person¡¯s heart and soul and mind shatters into shards of undeniable, terrible, irate pieces of problems, it hurts others too, to step on the pieces, and perhaps that¡¯s why people help each other, with a broom and a vacuum cleaner and a bottle of glue and a listening ear, unless other people are too busy smashing their own dinnerware to notice which shards are theirs and which belong to some other fragile human being. Perhaps it¡¯s just better to take out my plain mug the color of tears and drink.