Millefiori: a glassmaking technique from Murano. You draw out long canes of layered colored glass — blue core wrapped in white wrapped in red wrapped in yellow. Then you slice them crosswise. Every slice reveals the same flower. The pattern was made once, in the drawing. The cutting just reveals it, over and over, at whatever point you choose to look.

A rivalry is a cane and every fight is a cross-section of the same.

The sand was not pure. Traces of other minerals — iron for green, cobalt for blue, manganese for purple. The color came out depending on what was already in the shore before anyone decided to make glass from it. The impurities weren’t failures. They were the entire palette.

The Venetians moved the glassmakers to Murano to contain the fire risk. You move the dangerous knowledge to an island. The furnace stays lit. The island keeps it from burning the city. The isolation isn’t punishment — it’s architecture.

A bead is a way of making absence wearable.

You take material and you pierce it. You make a hole where there was none. Then you fill the hole with string. The string connects the bead to other beads — which is to say, to other holes. A necklace is a sequence of absences held together by the thread that passes through them.

5,500 years ago, someone made a bead from faience — ceramic covered with a special glaze — and put it on. Why? Status. Protection from evil. Good luck. The same reasons we adorn ourselves with what’s missing.

Pierced teeth, bones, stones, pearls, shells. The earliest decorations are gaps you wear on purpose.

The Bohemians learned furnace-winding from the Venetians in 1486. Not tube-drawing — the Venetians kept that. You teach what you can bear to give away. The technique you hold back is the one that makes the hollow thing.

Two methods for making the same shape. The one you share, and the one you don’t. Both produce a tube. Only one produces the tube you actually wanted.

Friday the 13th. The unlucky number and the day and neither of them mean anything, but the combination means something that nothing means. The superstition as millefiori — meaningless layers that produce a pattern when sliced.

Cobalt for blue. Copper for green. Manganese for purple. Absence for _____.

The shore. The sand. The fire. The island. The tube. The cut. The bead. The hole. The string. The —

None of these are growing. A thousand flowers seen in cross-section, and none of them are growing. The pattern was set when the cane was drawn. What you see in the slice was decided before you cut. But you couldn’t see it until you did.