It was a surprise nonetheless.
I walked up to my room and my eye immediately caught a vague shadow from the corner of my eye in the dim sitting area outside my room. Its like a ghostly image, an impossibility which made me do a double take for a moment. I switched on the light to see my spanish porcelin doll, broken months ago, standing on the coffee table. Something lurched in my stomach and i caught my breath. How could it be? Wild thoughts run through my head. For months, she has laid in pieces, kept in a marks&spencer green plastic bag, along with a tube of porceline glue on the coffee table. Rememberance of time past when i panicked when my cat broke it. The familiar premonition of evil heralding in the horizon when i picked up the pieces. I intended to fix it so long ago, an object i couldn't help but associate as a symbol for my then rocky relationship. A misguided attempt, an idea that i would be able to ward off the evil eye only if i could fix the doll back, yet at the back of my mind i despaired. I never had the chance to fix it back as it was too late. And i had not touched it since.

Months passed. My life went through hell and back. So many readjustments, so many conflicts outside me, within me. I have come to a point when i felt that i could not moved on much further. I thought of ending the relationship, and let the pieces continue to lay broken on my coffee table despite several half-hearted thoughts of fixing the doll again. The crux came when even my necklace, my constant companion of four years, his gift to me broke as well. When he replaced the chain with a new one, a stronger one, i could not help but think that it could never be the same, ever. I could not, or would not look at the pieces of my life and put them back together. New things are never quite the same as the old. I know i gave him alot of pain because of this but that was what i believed. Yet today, my spanish doll stand upright again. Did he fix it? He couldn't have, i would have seen him. And he didn't. He couldn't. Yet she is there standing. It is as though... it was magic.

Of course there is a rational explanation for it all. As improbable as it was to me at the moment, i asked my maid if she had touched my broken doll and she casually told me she fixed it this afternoon. She did not say why. I did not ask why. Actually who fixed it was no longer an issue. I know i wouldn't. I know he couldn't. Perhaps the streak of mysticism in me wanted to believe in a certain divine intervention. Something magical which could fix the doll when we couldn't, wouldn't, giving me a hope i realized by now, could not come from within or from him. A sign. An omen. Something which cannot be explained but leaves my stomach hanging in the air.

She is standing and even though i had thought i would never put her back together again, i couldn't help but feel like i really want to protect her now. She looked so vulnerable with lines running through her hair, her skirts, her hands. She is standing with so many scars and i had almost forgotten how familiar she looked.

It probably sound silly and whimsical. I know i have been searching for a reason to continue but i could not trust myself nor him. Not yet. This may be the stupidest thing for one to believe in but i would take it. Because it happened just when i needed to believe in something. A sign. Yes. An omen. The little nudge to propell us forward which no one else can deliver. That is what the now standing spanish porcelin doll means to me.