I’ve always been particularly affectionate towards pomegranates. The ripe beads of fruit never failed to please my three-year-old self, red juice staining my fingertips. As I’ve reflected upon tesserae, I’ve seen the parallels, seeds of pomegranates becoming building blocks to make up the whole fruit. I like to think of my life in that way—whether it’s tasks on checklists, 12-point E.B. Garamond letters that make up my poems, or the 365 days that create a year, life is not complete without its tiny aspects. Tesserae reminds me that even the small things make a difference.

I see tesserae in photos of “The World Begins With Every Kiss,” a mosaic in Barcelona, where I visited when I first joined Aster Lit. I see it in blackout poetry from my last summer program, in July digital photos that make up my photo gallery, in college campus glass buildings. I find tesserae in books I have inherited from my grandfather, the sweater I wear from my mom’s college days, and glasses of pomegranate juice. For Issue 15: Tesserae, I’m thinking of the memories that have created the person I am, remembering where I have come from and where it will lead me.

The first thing is color. When I wake up on chilled fall days, watery streaks of sunlight limning the curtains and feathering across the wall, I don’t see shape. Hazard of astigmatism, I guess, but the teapot on my dresser looks the same as the crocheted chicken I got for my birthday, in every sense but chromatic. Were it not for that ceramic’s vivid violet or the yarn’s rusty red, everything in my world would be a uniformly soft-edged blob. Instead, the hues I see mingle and interlace as though hugging each other across the air, and for a moment I think of Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation”: I will not return to a universe / of objects that don’t know each other, / as if islands were not the lost children / of one great continent.” 

These are my tesserae. You don’t see the shape of the individual tiles that make up mosaics, you see the composite image. The whole, not the parts—or rather, the subtle, intimate conversation between the parts as they hold each other like those lost islands. To all my fellow four-eyes, to those who have to rub away the sleep and blear from their face in the mornings, to those who space out at the wrong times, to the daydreamers and the night drivers, and those who hear or feel mosaics rather than see them: stay in that painted, melded, blurry collage for a minute more. See what happens when you let yourself live in a space of soft fragmentation, poetic recomposition. 

Ever since the creation of the universe, the world has been predetermined to host life from vast single organism structures, from the Pando forest to microscopic, subatomic particles like the electron. Despite not being able to observe the fundamental atoms that construct the very essence of our belonging, we must acknowledge and understand their existence as inalienable—albeit rudimentary—pillars of life. Comparably, a tessera is just a singular tile—a fragile, inconspicuous piece once used to paint a greater image. By itself, it may not portray a striking pattern or convey an image. However, a collection of different tiles can begin to form unique expressions and images. Similar to all individuals in society, our nuanced experiences and voices collectively envision a shared mosaic of the evolving status quo. Each poem, photo, painting, novel, is a testament to redrawing the edges of our cross-cultural amalgamation of identities, experiences, and possibilities. 

As put forth by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, design techniques such as trencadís recycled old, broken ceramic shards to make irregular mosaics during the Modernisme movement. To me, the recomposition and flexibility of reassembling degraded, individual ceramic pieces symbolizes the significance that lies in possibilities. As coined by Bertrand Russel, by being “citizens of the universe,” humans are ultimately stronger once they become accustomed to the impartiality and freedom of our thoughts. Through liberation from habitual customs and prejudices, we will finally be able to perceive “possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.”

We are made up of pieces from all of the people we have ever loved. It's a romantic sentiment, one that I have often found while scrolling through Instagram: in screenshots of old Tumblr posts, excerpts from poetry, aesthetic boards set to an indie song. It's true. My favourite cake recipe is one my best friend's mom would bake for me. I wear my makeup the way someone I will never see again told me was best for my face. If I have to teach someone a card game, I'll teach them the version of blackjack my teacher taught me.

Something in us can rage against this idea sometimes. We desperately want to be original, an island, we want to prove to the world or to ourselves that we are 'self-made'. Conversely, we can fall into the trap of thinking that we have no effect on others' lives. That we are too broken, too small, or too rough around the edges. Yet healing is not only about being restored, but allowing the fragments to be made into something new. For better or for worse, we are all made up of each other: the tesserae in each other's mosaics. 

When thinking of nostalgia, I always expect to relive the transformative, monumental moments defining an era, sometimes with lenses more golden than the truth. However, it’s the more ordinary things that actually come to mind first: the quiet graze of the sun against school desks, the sparkle of cheap Christmas lights, the fog of breath on chilled car windows. 

Tesserae reminds me of Roman mosaics: floor installations of chipped brick, fired tiles, smashed pottery, blown glass, cracked marble, the polished pebbles of a river, the burnished gold from a mine. The metaphorical definition surfaces, too. After all, a mosaic is the act of assembling fragments of what was into what it could be. By sealing the shattered edges with grout, an artist brings to life a new identity using pieces of the past. To me, Issue 15: Tesserae is beauty assembled through seemingly mundane tasks. It is a recorded buildup to the unveiling of a fresh wonder. 

In early Christian and Byzantine architecture, mosaics were often gilded; each angular tessera would undergo a process colloquially known as sandwiching, in which a gold leaf would be sealed in between two glass slabs of varying thicknesses before being sliced and placed into the mosaic artwork as a whole. When I’m thinking of tesserae, I’m thinking about the gold leaves of our lives—the memories that we choose to bury or expose, each with varying layers of protection. I’m thinking about the parts of our existence that unsheath themselves whether we’d like them to or not, and I’m thinking of how no matter how thick the glass, whatever exists below it will inevitably be revealed in varying shades of translucence. 

The tesserae of our lives aren’t always pretty—they aren’t always golden, either. They are blue and black and opaque and transparent and every shade of being in between. But when I’m thinking of tesserae for this issue, I’m thinking of illuminating the smaller pieces, the unexamined fragments of our lived recollections. For what is life, then, if not an amalgam of inhabited experiences? When writing for our fifteenth issue, I’m thinking of how the largest projects we will ever undertake in our lives will invariably begin with one step, and I’m thinking of how each step we take will invariably impact the whole of the journey.