There’s a section of your wall reserved for old things: antique photos browning with age and high school diplomas and them. They sting the wall on your path to your kitchen and most of the time you don't look for fear that they'll infect you with their indecisiveness.

Soft. Fuzzy. Watery. Weak.

You’d painted them in that wishy-washy medium years ago.

Impressions, you’d called it.

And you’d been so proud to see something from your own hand on the wall of an art show, like it made you an artist, made every shard of broken glass and nails that still stuck in your pin-cushion heart worth everything that paid for it.

It didn’t.

You walk by the watercolors every day and you feel nauseous, like the water used to paint them was under you, rocking you side to side, instead of dried on the wall in bold black frames that overpowered the pieces themselves.  But there’s a breaking point, a crescendo in time that forces your fingers to pry under them, to rip them from their nestled frame and lay them bare on your dining room table.

The frames can’t save you now, you whisper, almost manically, as you reach for the scissors. But they don’t even defend themselves, just stare at you with blank expressions that don’t say or think or feel or scream, and it drives you to make the first cut.

Yet there is a pattern under your blades. A method to this madness of unprovoked hatred at scraps of paper that haven’t been touched since you bought the house almost a decade ago.

But they fit together in the end.

You unearth a canvas from your pile of paints and pastels and mixed medium (never watercolor), and you lay the pieces out flat in a concrete shape.

You.

Him.

The fingers that tether you together, twisting infinitely in the complex weave of this life and this house and all the things that fill the space up; from a paint splattered ceiling to toothpaste to refrigerator magnets to carpet. There’s the rosy color of your fingernails, splices from the timid roses. The darkening veins on the back of his palm, cut in ravines from the stapler. The yellow of your wedding bands rung from the pale background of a coffee mug. You rearrange and reconfigure, modeling the present from the past. In the end you step back, taking in the patchwork collage of the mundane that compile into this composite of what now feels like.

Warm. Bold. Strong. Real.

Because you like the feeling of a million little missteps and coincidences and painful choices leading to a pair of heart-muscle straps and whispered truths and laughter condensed into an apothecary bottle. You like the idea that there was reason; that those mistakes that weren’t really mistakes make up the contentedness that beats steady in your chest like your timid strokes make up this collage. You like that tears can paint colors and lies can breed truth and bitterness can taste sweet on your tongue when you let it age somewhere underground and you like that chaos can all make sense in the end.

And somehow, as you hang the new canvas on the blank wall space that used to harbor the watercolors, you like them better this way.