https://Voice.club - Sonya’s fingers trembled as she lifted the tissue paper. Three ceramic shards lay nested inside the shoebox David had forgotten—or perhaps deliberately left—on her Bo-Kaap doorstep.
The largest piece bore traces of Table Mountain blue, from the glaze they’d mixed that humid February morning. She’d been teaching him to throw clay when he’d laughed, sending her wheel wobbling. “You’re impossible,” she’d whispered, but her heart had already tumbled.
The second fragment held the rim’s golden curve, painted the evening he’d first said he loved her. They’d watched the sunset paint False Bay while the vase dried between them, a promise taking shape.
The smallest piece carried the jagged memory of their last fight. “You can’t just leave for Hermanus,” she’d shouted, and in her fury, she’d swept the vase from the shelf. It had shattered like her trust, like their plans, like her heart.
But David had kept the pieces.
Through her studio window, the mountain caught the morning light, steady and eternal. Sonya reached for her strongest adhesive, the kind that made breaks invisible, that made broken things whole again.
The vase wouldn’t be perfect—the golden lines where it had cracked would always show. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the breaking and mending was what made it beautiful, what made it real.
She set the repaired vase on her passenger seat and started her car. The drive to Hermanus would take two hours, but some journeys were worth the distance.
At the marine research station, David looked up from his microscope to find her standing in his doorway, holding their reconstructed love.
“Only three pieces,” she said softly. “I thought there’d be more.”
“The important things,” he replied, rising to meet her, “are always simpler than we think.”
Outside, whales were singing in Walker Bay, and two hearts remembered how to beat as one.