The gummies she had wanted so much fell on the floor.
We both paused.
With a heavy voice, I said: Oh! What a pity that now you can’t eat them anymore!
And in that moment, I expected an outburst, a tantrum.
I took a deep breath, waiting.
Instead, in that space between desire and limit, she found another way.
With a sad face, she carefully gathered them, placed them neatly on a chair, then stuck them, one by one, to the sole of her shoe.
She started hopping on one foot, proudly showing me her masterpiece.
“I stepped on some eggs,” she said, laughing.
And here it was: even at her young age, this child can turn loss into play, an interdiction into an opportunity, a “you can’t anymore” into a “but look what else I can do.”
She didn’t stop at what she was denied.
She created worlds from leftovers, solutions from obstacles, beauty from what seemed lost to me.
And I asked myself: when did I stop doing all of this?
When did I start seeing loss as something tragic and humiliating?
When did I stop sticking the sweet pieces of life I had lost to my soles?
When did I start hiding them in the heavy pockets of shame?
When did I lose the game within me and let gravity settle in, like a mandatory mask?
When did I forget that beauty is not only in what comes out perfect, but also in fragile improvisations, in wild solutions, in dancing on one foot?
This child did not cling to a loss. She transformed it.
I, as an adult, almost always judge it, mourn it, carry it around my neck like a millstone.
Maybe that’s why I needed to witness this scene, to remember to become an alchemist again, to make stories out of scraps, and beginnings out of limits.
Maybe life isn’t about always gathering more and having everything I crave,
but about reinventing what remains after pleasures slip through my fingers.