It began with a question sent into a small, generous corner of the world, people who work with clay tend to answer each other kindly, and one of them offered more than I had asked for. Not just a piece, but a door, and an afternoon.

Ivana made coffee, and we talked longer than either of us probably expected to. She is the kind of person who notices the world the way you notice something you genuinely love, unhurried, curious, easy to sit with. An afternoon meant to be about pottery turned into something closer to the beginning of a friendship, the sort that arrives sideways, while you are looking at something else entirely.

Bowl’s break, when it came, asked for very little, one clean line across the interior, nothing dramatic, nothing that needed explaining. I called it The Split, for the line itself, though there is something quietly fitting in the name now. A split is usually where something comes apart. Here, it is closer to where something came together, a crack in a bowl, and somewhere alongside it, the start of knowing someone.