Fragments of a Whole
words by Pauline Tsui, art by Justina Lu
My life gathers itself in fragments—
fragments of color spread across the floor,
waiting for the slow, patient art
of being arranged into meaning.
Some of my tiles began in pieces.
Family shards—cracked, uneven—
still dotted with the dust
of everything we survived.
Cracked along my edges,
hairline fractures I learned to hide.
Their shadows pressed into the glass,
not all of it cruel, not all of it kind,
but enough to leave me rough
in ways I didn’t know how to sand.
But then came the people
who gently gathered my pieces.
I grew up feeling breakable,
like one wrong touch
could scatter me again.
Some of these pieces don’t fit neatly,
they never did,
but they became part of the pattern anyway,
their edges softened by time,
by that strange understanding that arrives
before forgiveness.
Childhood summers glazed in soft gold,
the girl from third grade whose voice
still crosses state lines,
Pennsylvania winds carrying her laughter
like a bird that remembers my window.
Her tile is a constant one,
steady as riverstone,
a color that stayed bright
even when everything else dimmed.
Even now, it lights the path
to who I am becoming.
High school added new hues:
friends whose kindness
absorbed into me like sunlight.
They taught me I didn’t have to
stand alone all the time,
that some hands will hold your pieces
with no expectation of perfection.
Their colors didn’t replace the brokenness—
they filled it with gold,
the way cracks in Kintsugi
are honored, not hidden.
In college,
new fragments appear,
sharp, vivid, growing into place.
People who read the hidden grout lines,
the ones I tried to fill with silence.
They trace the cracks without fear,
seeing not the damage but the shape beneath it—
the unfinished pattern, the colors waiting to be claimed.
With them, even the broken edges feel deliberate,
as if every fracture was meant
to make room.
There is someone now
who taps gently at the barriers
I built like fortresses,
not to break them violently
but to open a door
where a window used to be.
Their presence is the soft clink of glass against glass,
a new piece lowered into the growing picture,
a shimmer of light blooming across the mosaic.
Piece by piece,
layer by layer,
they shape me,
fitting long-lost pieces back into place.
Winter memories polished into glass,
spring friendships blooming in sudden green,
summer laughter warm against my skin,
autumn goodbyes drifting down
to become the foundation for something new.
They polish the childhood fractures,
brighten the corners time had dimmed,
and give meaning to the spaces
I once believed were empty.
Each cycle of people in my life
leaves its mark—
a tiny tile, a fleck of color—
another fraction of who I’m learning to be.
And when I step back,
the mosaic glimmers with a truth:
I am a mosaic of everyone:
those who shaped who I am—
who turned broken fragments
into something whole,
something luminous,
something worth being,
something I thought was beyond repair.
All of it became the portrait
of a life still growing—
one season at a time,
one person at a time,
one fragment closer
to whole.
