Kintsugi

I intentionally smash things. I only break porcelain objects; never glass, for that would be silly.

I listen to them crash as they connect with the travertine tiles and when the silence returns, after a deep breath I open my eyes and scoop down to collect the pieces. On my work-table, I usually spend the day alone finding out how to fix them. It’s addictive. Better than any jigsaw puzzle.

The first breakage was an unfortunate and avoidable accident involving a stick of butter shortly after my wife decided to leave me. Restoring the bowl in a twelve-piece dinner set unexpectedly proved to be the most satisfying of affairs. While I waited for my wife to call me, I broke the other eleven pieces.

Following the dinner-set, I broke anything that took my fancy. A restoration of a Doctor Who Tardis teapot took perseverance and time as it broke into far more pieces than I could have imagined.

I have found the most rewarding breakages to be the most complicated. Restoring a garden gnome breakage involved several painstakingly long stages of adhesion. Placement of pieces relied on the glue setting on the older fragments. Once it was gnome-like again, I had to fill the cracks with epoxy putty, use sandpaper to smoothen it, and pick up a paintbrush to revitalize the gnome’s bright red cap.

I saw that my wife liked a Facebook post that claimed you could fix a cracked plate with warm milk and duct-tape but a simple experiment proved that to be pure nonsense.

The moment you fix something is always a special one. Pressing the last fragment of a coffee mug into the awkward void left in its handle comes with a gratifying silence that lingers for the rest of the day. Everything I mend has a place on my shelf as if it is a medal. I broke it. I fixed it. I can fix anything.

I haven’t been able to fix everything. My late mother's favorite vase with floral patterns - an heirloom - I shamefully released with far too much force the day I saw my wife with that man. It screamed its way off the quartz countertop scattering snowflake-size shards across the kitchen. Much of it became powdery dust.

I have spent many months trying to correct that one-of-a-kind vase, applying every method I can, but the resulting vase, at the time of writing is inferior and unusable, ridden with large gaping holes and unable to stand upright on any shelf. I will keep trying all the same.