—
ブランコの
きしむ音だけが
こたえていた
only the creak
of the swing replied
as I fell from the air
—
It happened in a field that no longer exists.
Somewhere in rural Slovenia, near the edge of a housing block painted the kind of yellow that always looked tired, even in spring.
We called it “the playground,” but it was more steel than play—two rusted swings, a slide that peeled in summer, a seesaw that never really sawed.
Still, it was ours.
I must’ve been eight. Maybe nine.
The swing had that smell of old metal under sun—something warm and slightly sour.
We played that game where someone jumps off and someone else tries to land higher.
Physics, of course, didn’t care about our rules.
I remember flying.
And then not flying.
A body—not mine—crashing into mine mid-air.
The crunch was something I felt before I heard.
My arm bent in a way arms don’t.
And for a second, the world shrunk to the size of that pain.
Then it expanded again—to voices, to shouting, to a car seat that smelled of vinyl and summer sweat, to the inside of an ambulance painted in pastels I haven’t seen since.
At the hospital, the anesthesia mask smelled like strawberries.
Artificial and almost kind.
They said to count backwards.
I made it to six.
—
When I woke up, everything was different.
My arm, yes.
But also my understanding of time.
I couldn’t move it for weeks.
Couldn’t tie my shoes.
Couldn’t ride a bike.
I had to learn how to do everything with the other side of me.
To reach differently.
To ask for help.
I began doing everything with my left hand—brushing teeth, writing short shaky letters, flipping through books, opening jars with awkward grip.
It wasn’t elegant, but it was mine.
And since I couldn’t go out much, I stayed in.
In front of the TV mostly.
Cartoons, commercials, strange quiz shows and dubbed movies.
That’s how I learned German.
Not by planning to, but because that’s what was on.
Hour after hour, I watched and listened and slowly began to understand what the sentences meant.
Language, it turns out, has a way of seeping into you when your bones are healing.
Funny, how the body teaches the mind.
—
Years passed.
The bones healed.
The cast came off.
I became fast again.
And then—
It happened again.
A car.
A city.
A sound that makes no sound until after.
It wasn’t a dramatic accident.
Just the wrong place at the wrong moment.
And there I was—older, with better shoes but the same arm, now re-broken.
The same waiting.
The same stillness.
Except this time, I wasn’t a child.
This time, I knew what it meant to be slowed.
—
And here’s the thing no one tells you:
Sometimes the body remembers better than the mind.
Even now, I still hesitate before lifting something heavy with my left.
Even now, I sometimes reach first with my right, out of habit stitched into muscle.
That arm taught me to wait.
To adapt.
To fail differently.
—
Wabi-sabi Lesson
We don’t break once and heal once.
We break, and heal, and break again.
And each time, the repair teaches us something different.
Not about being strong.
But about becoming soft where we used to be hard.
Time gives things character.
Scars are just history made visible.
And sometimes, the parts of us that have broken
are the ones most skilled at holding on.
—
Now, I sometimes sit on swings just to hear the creak.
I walk past playgrounds and notice the slight tilt of old metal.
I touch my arm and wonder how something so fragile carried so much.
And I know—
The real injury wasn’t to the bone.
It was to the illusion of permanence.
But that’s okay.
Because nothing precious lasts untouched.
And nothing whole was ever truly unchanged.
And the most human thing we do is heal slowly,
in crooked lines,
with stories we carry long after the pain is gone.
—
If you ever break—anything, really—
I hope you remember this:
The world doesn’t need you to be unbroken.
It needs you to stay.
To reach.
To keep finding new ways to hold on.
life 
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