This note begins on a quiet Sunday in Hamburg, with a small puzzle poured from a tube onto a dark wooden table worn smooth by everyday use. The pieces are tiny and a yummy coffee is made. Outside, the city keeps its low winter hum, but inside the room everything slows.

My girlfriend and her daughter fall into a rhythm they don’t need to explain, one building the jigsaw frame, the other gathering clusters, pyramids finding pyramids, sand finding sand. Their hands move fast and sure, murmuring in a private language shaped by years of doing things side by side.

The puzzle takes form and I marvel as I see pyramids rise. And then, near the end, one piece is missing. It doesn’t cause alarm and they finish the picture anyway and move on …one into a lie-down, the other into colour and paper and a new art project, the table already making space for what comes next.

What lingers is not the puzzle itself, but the absence it leaves behind. I drift into the weight of unfinished things, into the way some people let gaps go easily annnndd I wonder about the pieces we don’t rush to replace, because sometimes what’s missing might be what stays with us the longest. Thanks for drifting with me.

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