The old wrench lay useless in my palm, its chrome surface reflecting the afternoon sun. Mei stood beside me, her delicate fingers tracing the worn edges of the tool that once belonged to her grandfather.
“It’s strange,” she said softly, “how something can lose its purpose but gain so much meaning.”
I nodded, understanding perfectly what she meant. We were standing in her grandfather’s abandoned workshop, where time seemed to flow differently among the rusty tools and sawdust-covered workbenches.
“Do you remember when we first met here?” I asked, though I knew she did. Some memories are too precious to forget.
Mei smiled, her eyes distant. “You were trying to fix your bicycle chain with this exact wrench. Grandfather saw you struggling from his window and sent me to help.”
“And it didn’t work then either,” I laughed. “The wrench was already broken.”
“But you kept coming back anyway,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
The workshop had become our sanctuary over the years. While her grandfather crafted beautiful wooden furniture upstairs, we would sit among the tools, sharing dreams that felt too fragile for the outside world.
“I never really needed my bicycle fixed,” I admitted.
“I know.” Her reply carried the weight of all our unspoken words.
The sunlight streaming through the dusty windows created patterns on the floor, like ancient characters spelling out a story we were both part of but couldn’t fully read.
“Sometimes I think,” Mei began, taking the wrench from my hand, “that broken things have their own kind of wholeness. Like this wrench - it can’t turn bolts anymore, but it turned our lives in a different direction.”
I watched as she placed the wrench back on its designated hook on the wall, where it had hung for decades before today. Tomorrow, the workshop would be demolished, making way for a new apartment complex. Progress, they called it.
“What happens now?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was asking about - us, the workshop, or the wrench that had brought us together.
Mei reached for my hand, her touch as familiar as the workshop’s musty air. “Some things don’t need fixing,” she said. “They just need to be remembered.”
As we stepped out of the workshop for the last time, the setting sun cast long shadows behind us. The wrench remained on its hook, catching the last rays of light - a broken tool that had built something far more lasting than any mechanism it might have tightened in its working days.
In the years that followed, whenever I passed by the apartment building that replaced the workshop, I would feel the phantom weight of that useless wrench in my palm. And somehow, in its inability to function as intended, it had performed its most important task: bringing two souls together in a space where time moved differently and broken things held their own kind of magic.