Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 11

The morning sun filtered through the kitchen window like a polite guest, too gentle for what the day truly deserved. It painted golden streaks across the dining table, the old wood catching light in its cracks, as if even it had aged in sorrow. The scent of garlic rice and eggs clung to the air, mingling with the faint trace of detergent still lingering on the plates from last night. Everything was still. Too still.

I sat at the table, stirring my coffee absently. The dream I had, whatever it was, floated somewhere in the back of my mind like a vapor I couldn’t catch. It didn’t matter anyway. My thoughts were still on the ocean.

Last night replayed in flashes. James’s hoodie still hung on the back of my chair, and I swear the sleeves looked like arms folded in prayer. We had laughed like the world hadn’t taken anything from us, like we were just kids again, no secrets, no past, no bruised hearts. And then that moment, when he leaned in, and I didn’t pull away.

We didn’t kiss. But the space between us felt sacred. Like the hush in a church before someone says “I do.” That kind of silence—full of what-ifs and almosts. I didn’t know what to do with that moment now. So I just kept stirring.

And then it happened.

Clink.
Crash.

The sound cut through the morning like a slap. I flinched. My father’s coffee mug lay shattered on the floor, white porcelain bleeding across the tiles, scattering like teeth knocked out in a fight.

My father stood over it, still holding the handle in his hand. The rest of it was gone. A jagged arc of ceramic, his favorite mug, her favorite mug, really. The one with the small blue fish on it. The one she bought from a roadside stall on their honeymoon and joked was their first “investment.”

His hands trembled.

Not the way a leaf trembles in the wind. No. His tremble was deeper. Like something in the foundation had cracked and everything above it was swaying, barely held together.

He didn’t speak. He crouched down, slowly, the way a man does when he knows he can’t afford to fall. He picked up the pieces with deliberate care, as if the mug would apologize if he showed it enough tenderness.

And I watched.

Because that’s what grief teaches you, doesn’t it? To watch. To observe the quiet undoing of the people you love and pretend you don’t see it. Because if you speak it out loud, it becomes more real. I used to think grief was loud. That it looked like sobbing in the rain, or screaming into the void, or pounding your fists against a hospital wall. But no one tells you that grief is also this: A man with shaking hands trying to clean up ceramic pieces so his daughter doesn’t worry. A girl pretending not to notice so her father won’t feel even more broken. A coffee mug on the floor, shattered, because some things are too fragile to hold heat anymore.

I looked at him and thought: we are all just things that break quietly.

Loss doesn’t announce itself with grandeur. It slips into the room, silent as breath, and rearranges everything. It leaves fingerprints on your morning rituals, bruises on the ordinary. A cracked plate. A forgotten laugh. A hand that used to be steady. And mourning? Mourning is love with nowhere to go. It’s the way he still cooks too much rice. The way he leaves the porch light on at night like she might come home. The way he hasn’t deleted her number.

He looked up at me for a second, then away just as fast. “Clumsy,” he mumbled, his voice dry.

I nodded. “Happens.”

But inside me, something crumbled too. A quiet ache bloomed behind my ribs, the kind that doesn’t spill tears but lingers all day like smoke after a fire. I didn’t cry. Not in front of him. Because if I did, he might break all over again. And this time, not like a mug. Not like something you can glue back together. But like a man who had his whole world taken and is still trying, every day, to pretend he can carry the pieces.