The ceremony was the easy part. A broken thing can be mended. A shattered vase can be glued back together, its cracks filled with gold in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi. But your heart? Your heart wasn’t broken. It was incinerated. Reduced to a pile of fine, grey ash. There’s nothing to glue back together. There are no pieces to find. There is only a gaping, echoing void where something vital used to burn. This is a different kind of pain. It’s not the clean break of a bone that can be set and healed. It’s the scorched earth that remains after a forest fire. Nothing grows there. Not a single blade of grass. You walk through the landscape of your own chest and all you see is devastation. You feel the wind blow through you, and it’s a cold wind, because there’s nothing left to hold the warmth. So you build a fortress around the ash. You tell yourself, “Never again.” And you mean it. In my years of working in this territory, I've seen this pattern dozens of times. You see happy couples and a sneer curls your lip. You hear a love song and it sounds like