Today, I write to you from the depths of pure devastation.
Recently, my beloved little bowl leaped out of my handbag and crashed onto the tile below, shattering into a few big, unmistakable pieces. Not a crack. Not a chip. Total annihilation.
My stomach instantly dropped. My chest clenched. And then, dramatically but also completely sincerely, I actually started crying. If you’ve ever broken a piece you actually loved, you already understand the scale of this reaction. It’s disproportionate, sure. It’s also completely correct.
It was my piece, my little sidekick. It came everywhere with me and served me well for a few years, which by any measure is a long-term relationship. Long ago, a friend gave it to me — I haven’t seen them in years, but the pipe stuck around, which felt like a small, useful physical talisman forever marking our connection in time and space. It was tangible. It held memories. It held routine. It held, quite literally, the shape of my hand — until it didn’t.
There’s something uniquely brutal about the way glass breaks — not just physically, but existentially. One second, it’s intact, integrated into your life, part of your daily sensory rotation. The next, it’s a pile of fragments you can’t fix or glue back into anything functional. You can’t pretend that it’s the same object. There’s no slow fade; just a hard stop.
I did what any rational person would do: I tried to assign meaning to it. It was Mercury retrograde — fitting, actually — and Instagram assured me that we were all in a period of releasing what no longer serves us, on top of it. Fine. Sure. If my spoon was cosmically destined to exit my life, who was I to argue?
This is, of course, bullshit. But it’s elegant bullshit, and sometimes that’s enough to get you through the first 24 hours. Because the real issue isn’t just that it broke. It’s that a glass piece, if it’s a good one, is never just a thing. It’s functional art in the most literal sense — you don’t hang it on a wall, you mostly, actually live with it. You handle it constantly. You build rituals around it. It becomes embedded in your muscle memory in a way that’s hard to replicate with anything else.
Which means when it’s gone, it takes a small but specific version of your life with it. That’s the part that catches you off guard. Not the inconvenience — though, yes, suddenly you don’t have your preferred way to smoke, which is its own kind of crisis — but the absence of something that felt quietly essential. It’s a friend. A good piece changes your Cannabis experience by shaping and refining it. It becomes the portal between you and the plant. And portals are sacred spaces!
And then, because it’s glass, it reminds you that none of that is permanent. There’s a lesson in there, if you want one. Something about attachment, about fragility, about the risk inherent in loving objects that are designed — beautifully, inevitably — to break.
Or, more realistically, there’s just this: If you’re going to care about your pieces — and you should, because that’s half the point — you also have to accept that one day, probably at the worst possible moment, you’re going to watch one hit the ground and shatter. And it’s going to feel bad.
You’ll replace it, eventually. You’ll find another one that fits in your hand the right way, that earns its place in your rotation, that starts to accumulate its own set of associations. It won’t be the same, which is exactly why this one will stick.
But for a minute — or an hour, or a day or however long your grief lasts — you’re just standing there, looking at the pieces, thinking: Well, fuck. And honestly? That’s part of it, too. Thanks for the memories; onto the next piece we go.
