Aika took the two largest pieces of the plate and coated one side with the gold liquid. “This is the Japanese art of kintsugi,” she said, never taking her eyes off what she was doing. “I am using a gold lacquer like a glue to repair the plate. To put the broken pieces of the plate back together.”
Aika pushed the pieces together, the two broken segments of the plate now fixed together, a stunning gold line tracking down where the break previously was. “This art form is the physical manifestation of the principle of wabi-sabi.
Wabi-sabi teaches us to embrace life’s imperfections, its impermanence and incompleteness.”
“Like Sakura, the cherry blossom trees,” Savannah whispered, emotion thickening her voice.
“Yes. Like sakura,” Aika said. She then nodded to our broken plates and our tools. “Please, begin. Follow what I am doing.”
My hand was shaking when I reached for my paintbrush. Savannah didn’t move for a few minutes, eyes closed and breathing. I placed my hand on her thigh. Her eyes fluttered open. “You okay?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” she said. She gave me a watery smile. “I just … needed a few minutes.” Savannah reached for the paintbrush and began reconstructing her plate.
There was total silence as we all worked. With every piece I glued back together, flashes of the past year came to mind. About the catatonic state I was in after Cillian died. About the anger that had taken root and spread like a plague throughout my body until it had consumed me. I recalled the first time I had shunned my parents, screaming at them to leave me alone. About when I had walked out of my teams’ hockey rink and never looked back, refusing to start Harvard in the fall. When I had thrown my skates in the pond shed and slammed the door. When I had taken Cillian’s hockey stick and smashed it to smithereens on the frozen pond we loved so much.
Each of them was a crack in my soul.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
They were the physical manifestation of my heart breaking, my soul shattering into a thousand broken pieces. I never believed that I could be put back together.
Until this trip.
Until I fell in love with the most incredible girl who made me dare to hope again.
Were they my gold lacquer? Was this what was happening to my broken spirit? Was this trip, these new friendships, Leo and Mia’s guidance, and falling deeply in love with my girl, my kintsugi? Could I—
we all
—be somehow put back together? Or was I broken all over again since the exposure therapy? Had my pieces been refractured? Did I have to scramble to find them again? Or were they smashed into too many pieces that it was unsavable? That was my biggest fear. That it was too far gone to be healed.
“Are you struggling?” Aika asked me. My hands were suspended in the air and I realized I had been sitting still, lost in my head. Then I heard her question filter into my ears. Was I struggling?
Too much.
Swallowing, I met Aika’s searching gaze. “Is it …” I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at asking this question out loud. But I had to know. “Are there any plates that are too broken to be repaired? Any … hopeless cases?”
The room was silent as my question thickened the air. I felt Savannah’s hand land on my knee in support. But I never took my eyes off Aika. My breath was held as I waited for her answer.
“No,” Aika said, matter-of-fact. “The shattered pieces may take longer to find, and they certainly would take longer to fix back together. But any broken plate can be mended with time and the sheer tenacity to do it.”
The relief I felt from her answer almost knocked me off my chair. I could feel Aika watching me closer. When I looked up and met her eyes again, she nodded her head once, like she could see into my soul. That curt nod was in encouragement. I knew she understood why I had really asked that question. Everyone around this table did.
“Okay, baby?” Savannah asked, her whispered voice shaking with sadness. Sadness for me.
“I’m okay,” I said and gave her hand a squeeze, then carried on, ignoring everyone else’s heavy focus on me.
Lost to the hours it took to fix the plate, I sat back when the final piece had been fixed back into place. As I looked down upon my lacquered plate, I lost my breath.
It was fixed. It wasn’t as it was before, but it was put back together. It was something new. But it was a plate again.
“What do we see now when we look at our plates?” Aika asked, her voice softer now, gentler, like she knew we were all as fragile as the plates we’d just spent our day rebuilding. The lacquer would take time to dry. To make it as strong as it was before.
“It’s beautiful,” Savannah said, staring down at her plate. She blinked away tears from her eyes and met Aika’s gaze. “I think it’s even more beautiful than it was before.”
“Ah,” Aika said. “This is true.” She gestured to all our plates. “A lesson then,” she said and smiled. “That that which is broken, once repaired, can be more beautiful than it was before.”
Chills tracked down my spine and spread out over my body. I reached out and took Savannah’s hand. Her fingers were trembling, and when I looked up, tears were trickling down her cheeks, like they were her own salty tracks of lacquer. I stared, captivated by my girl. She had been beautiful when we’d met. When she was broken into thousands of pieces. But now, when this trip and therapy had gradually glued her back together with golden lacquer, she was more beautiful than ever.
I knew my own pieces were still broken. Not all lacquered back together …
yet. But as I looked down at my plate, I knew I
could be. Someday. I would never be the same after losing Cillian—none of us were after losing our loved ones. You couldn’t lose someone you loved so much and ever return to the person you were before.
Loss changed you.
But you could heal. You could repair your fractured spirit with golden lacquer and hold on to life. That life wouldn’t look the same ever again. But it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. That it wouldn’t be beautiful. Perhaps loss taught a person to love life more. Because you understood what it was like to lose that life. You wouldn’t take it for granted anymore.
I knew I wasn’t there yet. But if I kept going. If I kept trying, kept repairing my broken pieces, perhaps I could be.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.