The Blue Cup
I found it at a market stall between a broken clock and a tray of mismatched cutlery. Soren said six coins was too much. I bought it anyway. I use it every morning.
Soren has since retracted his position on the six coins. He did so without prompting, about three weeks after I bought the cup, when he picked it up to look at it properly and said — quietly, in the way he admits things — "this is a good cup."
It is a good cup.
The cup is handmade in the obvious way — the rim not quite level, the glaze crazing slightly near the base, the handle a little thicker than a factory would allow. These are not flaws, exactly. They are the record of someone making it.
I don't know who made it. The market stall had no name. The vendor and I had no language in common and managed the transaction entirely through gesture and goodwill. The cup has no mark. It came from somewhere and was made by someone and those facts are now sealed into the object, inaccessible but present.
I find this satisfying rather than frustrating. The cup doesn't need a provenance. It has a history — it just doesn't include me until six coins and a Sunday morning in a market I can't remember the name of.
It lives on the second shelf of the kitchen dresser. Every morning one of us takes it down — it holds coffee the right way, something about the thickness of the clay — and puts it back afterwards. Soren uses it roughly as often as I do now, which I consider a full vindication.
I have a photograph of it from the first week: sitting on a windowsill in the room we were renting, full of morning coffee, a pale rectangle of light behind it. I took it because the light was good.
Now I look at it because the cup is there.