I found these two tiny porcelain cups during one of my trips to Japan. Depicting a pair of birds, I immediately imagined them as a male and a female. They represented a quiet vision of companionship, love, and the possibility of building a family—an imagined future that long existed in symbolic form before becoming part of my own life. Like many of the small objects I collected over the years, they became emotional stand-ins for dreams that had not yet taken shape.

Years later, during Christmas dinner at my apartment in Paris, I brought them to the table to serve liqueur. It was an intimate evening shared with my new Brazilian friend in Paris and the man who would soon become my partner. By the end of the night, one of us accidentally dropped the taller bird—the one I had always imagined as the male—and it shattered on the floor. The following days marked the beginning of our relationship. I could never bring myself to throw the bird away. Instead, I carefully glued every fragment back together. It remains visibly broken, yet whole enough to continue standing beside its companion. Looking at them today, I realize they have become something different from what I first projected onto them. They no longer represent the hope of finding love, but the quiet understanding that love, like these objects, is rarely perfect. It survives through care, repair, and the willingness to keep what has already been broken.