Shatter and Repair: Golden Lines of Life and Love // Part I

I stood in a dusty dugout wearing blue Osh-Kosh-B’Gosh overalls, holding a pink balloon, staring at a boy who was staring back at me. I was two years old, and it was love at first sight. One of our parents snapped a picture that lives in my baby album, protected by a crinkly-crackling sleeve turned sepia-toned by time.

For the next several years, my childhood summers revolved around adventures with that boy — Ben Davis, we’ll call him. Ben and I would ride our 7-speed bikes across town, wreaking havoc en route to the swimming pool, where time didn’t exist until the sinking orange yolk of the sun told us it was time for dinner.

On our way home one evening, my bike chain fell off. I hollered to Ben, and he backtracked to where I stood, baffled at how to fix the mechanical malfunction. We were on a narrow dirt path in a stretch of trees that felt 100 miles from home without my two-wheel transport.

Ben assessed the chain like a doctor in the war field. He performed open heart surgery on my bike, fearlessly facing grease-blood and metal. I remember thinking there was no greater hero on earth than 10-year-old Ben Davis: love of my life, fixer of bikes, keeper of my heart. He stood victoriously, handing me the handles of my chariot, and we rode home by the light of a thousand blinking fireflies.

Time passed; Ben and I began growing up, and awareness infiltrated our innocence. We became strangers to ourselves and each other in our new, conscientious adolescent skin. Bikes turned into cars, cuteness turned to coolness, and our greetings devolved into awkward waves out of polite recognition.

If my childhood romance with Ben Davis taught me one thing, it’s that love would never be so uncomplicated again; the theme of the next three decades would be shitsuren and kintsuigi.

In Japanese, shitsuren means broken heart. Kintsuigi is the practice of repairing broken pots and vases with gold. As a philosophy, kintsuigi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, “rather than something to disguise.” So, instead of hiding my shitsuren, I’m going to transcribe lessons learned from each. I’m going to tell the tales of shatter and repair.

If you know my writing, you know it’ll be deep, telling, and occasionally tragic. Stay tuned.