We move through life collecting thoughts, moments and feelings. Some we dwell on, others we let pass without a second thought. But certain things linger, pressing at the edges of our awareness, asking to be reconsidered. “On Second Thought” is where I return to those musings — the overlooked, the uncertain, the unresolved — to give them the attention they deserve.
My name is Madison Butchko, and this column is a space for reflection, for pulling apart the thoughts that resist easy answers. Here, I write to question, to challenge, to sift through complexity in search of truth. Some ideas shift when revisited, others hold steady — but all are worth a second thought.
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Last summer, my friend brought me a small clay bowl from his trip to Egypt. Ultramarine blue and fitting perfectly in my palm, it had a thin black rim with an animal I couldn’t identify painted at the bottom. I almost cried when he handed me the blue bowl that night, standing outside my apartment. He rarely offered me anything. In our friendship, the smallest gestures from him felt monumental.
He left for home, for another continent soon after. These partings were familiar but still pained me. Months passed, and the bowl rested on my desk through summer into fall. I wrote long messages, giving everything of myself, only to receive brief responses or silence. I crafted explanations for his absence, wanting to believe it was busyness rather than apathy.
When we called after almost two months, the first thing he said to me was, “What do you want to say to me?” Even then, I convinced myself we would return to what we had been. There is a kind of hope that resembles denial. I chose not to acknowledge it.
I don’t remember when exactly in the fall something finally shattered inside me. Just that I remember sobbing uncontrollably. One night, in a surge of fury and despair, I grabbed the bowl and slammed it against my desk. The clay shattered more easily than I expected. I wanted release, but the breaking felt like nothing. I hadn’t realized how fragile it was. Feeling strangely underwhelmed, I swept the shards into my desk drawer, burying them beneath paper and pens.
He doesn’t know I smashed it. He doesn’t know that I’ve destroyed most of the few things he gave me. Maybe because I could never explain why he made me feel so destroyed inside. I could only express my feelings through my hands, breaking the pieces of him that he left me.
Months later, I still think about the bowl — how it once was, how our friendship once was, how I once was. And who I am now, long after the bowl lay in pieces, after four years of friendship collapsed in one irreparable break. Or maybe it wasn’t a single break but a slow accumulation, each crack widening until the final break became inevitable.
Over those four years, every time we said it was the end, it never really was. Although every fracture felt like an ending, somehow, we always found our way back. Our process reminded me of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold — creating something more beautiful for having been broken. For years, our friendship felt like that. Splintering, then mended, the fault lines visible but somehow precious. Each time we rebuilt after arguments and hurt, I imagined gold seams holding us together, proof that we were worth saving.
But this time was different. I felt it — an emptiness carved where my friend once was, impossible to explain but undeniable. Some breaks are too deep to mend — not with gold, not with apologies, not with anything at all.
Trust fractured in moments too small to recount, leaving only their growing weight. By the time I noticed, I had already stopped confiding in him. When the heart is bruised, it builds walls. Mine became a fortress, impenetrable even to myself. I missed him while he was still in my life, mourning our friendship long before it ended.
Now, as fall faded into spring, I felt only exhaustion — a hollowing. Not the sharp edge of fresh pain, but something duller, more insidious, a lesion that never fully heals. When people asked how I am, I said “fine” because I lacked the vocabulary to explain this strange sense of floating between absence and acceptance, between feeling too much and nothing at all.
The week before we stopped talking, I saw him in-person before he left. I told him it wasn’t the distance that bothered me, but that he was leaving me — again — for his other relationships, his other people. I was not included in his other world. I told myself I wouldn’t let my sadness interfere with my work, as it so often did, but that week, I stayed in bed. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even consciously sad. But my body knew what my mind refused to acknowledge. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t engage. I couldn’t live. I moved through the days, existing in a strange emptiness: not quite grief, not quite relief.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t separate him from everything that came before. I wanted separation for self-preservation, yet it was also what I feared most. Our last conversation ended with a decision to take space — followed by silence. His silence was more devastating than any explosive goodbye.
With him now truly gone from my life, grief found me differently than before. I didn’t sob on my floor or write agonizing, long messages that I’d send then promptly delete — things I once did, though I’m embarrassed to admit it. Yet something fundamental had shifted inside me, like furniture rearranged in a dark room. I kept stumbling into the empty space where our friendship had been.
After a week of separation and drifting through classes, on Friday night, the tears came. And with them, an unexpected companion: the urge to write. To document, to bear witness, to make my pain more than suffering — to shape it into meaning before it disappeared. My hand moved almost without permission, reaching for the journal that had remained empty for months.
The page became the confidant I no longer had. It made no demands, offered no judgment. It simply held what I placed there — the anger, the confusion, the desolation, the despair, the terrible relief of an ending I’d secretly anticipated.
In this exchange between self and page, I questioned what I thought I knew about writing. “Writing as discovery” was just another empty, cliched phrase from workshop critiques; something professors parroted with a wave of a hand. I nodded along. Writing was architecture to me — blueprints and careful measurements, the precision of knowing exactly what I meant before committing it to paper. But that night, writing became archaeology instead — digging through memory and defense, brushing dust from buried truths. Emotional bedrock. Excavated fragments. Remnants of a self I had forgotten.
My urge to forget my friend is as strong as my urge to write about him. I want to understand him, to understand myself, but I don’t know how. All I know is that I am hurt, that I have been hurt for a long time, even if I can’t untangle its meaning or reasoning. Perhaps it’s the shame of not knowing, the inability to articulate what went wrong. After these four years, I cannot explain this pain — not to him, not to others who ask me why I’m so sad, not even to myself. And that inability hurts most of all because it makes me question if my pain was ever real at all.
I am learning to accept both my feelings and the finality of this loss. Writing makes it real — too immediate, too intense. When I write, I fully feel and I fear feeling. Fully confronting this loss might break me, and I don’t know if I can put myself back together anew.
I don’t know if we’ll ever be close the way we once were, or if I want to move on. The bowl remains, though my friend does not. Its remnants sit untouched in my drawer. Powdered bits of blue clay and sharp edges that I can’t bring myself to discard or disregard.
I never tried to repair the bowl. I don’t plan to. I wouldn’t know how anyway. But maybe one day, I will — if only to finally figure out which animal was painted on the bottom.
For now, I’ve found another kind of kintsugi: one made of words. In writing, I find my friend again, preserved in fragments and sentences. On the page, I piece our friendship back together — not as it is now, but as it once was. Here, I can say “Hello,” “I miss you,” “I’m still here,” “Goodbye,” holding a conversation that reality no longer permits.