Prologue

Shattered

Shards — April, 2024 — Halle, Belgium

Gabriel blew a breath through clenched teeth. Spittle intermingled with the light drizzle that floated rather than fell, indecisive, cold, unnerving. He strained to remember the last time frustration had overwhelmed him like this. The only thing that came to mind was rebooting his old Windows 95 PC for the umpteenth time, only to be met with yet another, different but similar error screen.

Gabriel lowered his gaze to his hands, streaked with black grease. He turned to the bike, half-thrown against the wall. The familiar dring, dring of an oncoming biker made him reflexively step off the towpath onto the wet grass, closer to where the bike lay. He glared at the middle-aged woman who gave him a grateful smile. Was she even middle-aged from his perspective if they were about the same age? At least she had a working bike to show for it.

The rage seized him again. Glancing at his watch, a once cherished gift, didn't help. Fifteen minutes left until his appointment. Nor did the drizzle, leaving no visible trace yet seeping beneath clothing and flesh to dampen the spirit. And that was without accounting for the stench, rancid canal water to his right, sour sweat and stale piss steeped into the concrete overpass against which his broken bike leaned.

He wrinkled his nose, his upper lip curling with it. A sudden, near-irresistible urge took hold of him. A voice, inaudible yet overpowering, rose with it.

"What the fuck happened to you, man? Look at you!" Gabriel did and found no fault in the voice's reasoning. "Aren't you supposed to be some apex predator with a mighty roar?" Gabriel shook his head in disgust, as the voice would, if only it had a head to shake. "Ugh. More like a stray cat with a pathetic mewl. Look. At. You. Close to tears because… what? Your fucking bike broke down and you might be late for an appointment with a social worker. A social worker. You?" Gabriel's eyes fell back to the chain. "Throw that whole thing in the canal. And while you're at it, might as well jump in right after it. Don't you think?"

Gabriel's lips curled into a snarl again, more vicious than before. A part of him still ached to prove the voice wrong. But to whom? His head dipped in resignation. His gaze shifted from the bike to the canal, then back again. A few times.

The little ones' faces flashed through his mind.

He stood there, frozen, breath caught in his chest, greasy, sticky, dirty fingers curled into shaking fists. How could he have forgotten? Oh, but he'd never really entertained the idea, had he? Of course not. Not him. Never him.

And yet, his shoulders sagged. He crouched beside the bike and gathered it up. Despite the black streaks already covering his hands and clothes, he didn't bother trying to hook the chain again. He'd ride another hundred meters and the same scene would replay. Fuck that. The same simmering, cold anger rose as Gabriel eyed his watch again. Nine minutes to the meeting.

He took out his phone. Without the data plan he'd had to cancel, Google Maps still showed the previous arrival time. He let out a dark chuckle, threw the phone into his pocket, and began jogging, the useless bike trailing beside him.

Oh, calm down; it's not the end of the world. Or so the saying goes. But what if it were? What if there were something you could only survive once, never twice?

Right there, beneath the overpass, Gabriel was certain this was his moment.

But, oh boy—was he wrong…

Look, I get it. With a cheery title like Ash Flake in a Blizzard, you probably expected something lighter, and instead you got grease, drizzle, and a broken bike. Ever since I first considered writing this story, I kept hitting my head against the how. How do you impose structure on four messy decades without pretending you can package chaos in neat, chronological little chapters?

In trying to sum up Gabriel's life, I found the answer in the life cycle of a legendary sword. Such a weapon begins as ore, raw and full of unrealized possibility, much like childhood. In the forge, a sword transforms and takes shape. Once shaped, it spends the bulk of its life as a blade. But not all blades survive all battles. Some deform, others chip, a few shatter into shards. Most are left to rust. A fortunate few are gathered, melted down, and reforged into something new—a knife, a chair, a shield.

Back in 2023, I believed I had myself figured out. I knew who I was. Hard questions didn’t give me pause; they hardened the core of my identity. To this day, I think of the essence, the ego, the me, as a recipe refined over a lifetime. Back then, I thought I’d simplified mine down to two ingredients: an eye for judging character and an insatiable appetite for introspection. I’d stress-tested both ad nauseam, and even when one buckled, finding the flaw and correcting for it only strengthened my faith in the recipe. It's not for nothing that my favorite Rwandan proverb says: Ibuye ryagaragaye ntiriba rikishe isuka, which you could translate to Once revealed, a stone will no longer break your hoe.

Introspection and observation served me well until the impossible happened. One day in the spring of 2024, in the aftermath of a single conversation, I glanced up and the sky was ablaze. In seconds, the colorful chaos of my life dissolved into ember oranges, angry reds, and choking grays beneath a meteor roaring toward my world… only seconds from impact.

So, back to that question. Wasn't that moment beneath that overpass Gabriel's hardest thing? Since Gabriel and I have a few things in common, dashing good looks included, allow me to speak of my hardest thing.

It wasn’t the cold realization that my back was against the wall, that life doesn’t always sort itself out. It wasn’t overconfidence catching up, pissed like there was no tomorrow, intent on exacting revenge—late fees and all. Hell, it wasn’t even the voiceless rage, faithless prayers, or the humiliation of trading pride for survival.

No. The hardest thing was hearing, from loved ones and circling vultures alike, the many flavors of my brokenness. Not only hearing but choosing to listen. Eventually, to understand. It was resisting the urge to argue, deflect… or joke it away. No wit. No bravado. It was sitting in the wreckage and, for once, resisting four decades' worth of self-reinforced instincts. To fight back. To defend. To surrender nothing. To stop—nay, pause—and simply… accept.

Call it impostor syndrome, timidity—yeah, right—or just another blind spot, but I always thought that only important people got to write memoirs. Surely, I wasn't yet one of them. Part of overcoming that hardest of things was accepting that my experience needed no external validation to matter. That belittling myself was no more humility than bragging would be confidence.

I could meander around this why for pages, but if there's one crucial takeaway, it's this. During my darkest nights, I would have given a kidney and half a liver to have had this story as a companion.

This is a chronicle of a life, my story, my truth—one voice whispering in a crowd more than eight billion strong. And yet, it matters.

At my lowest, I needed help the way a drowning man needs air. The problem was that asking for it has never come naturally. Still doesn't. As much as I'd like to think myself a snowflake, unique in my complexity, I'm probably closer to an ash flake: still complex, but hardly alone. Somewhere out there are others afraid to ask for help, blind to their own blind spots, sinking just the same. I was incredibly lucky. Someone noticed and acted anyway. Someone who would have come running had I only asked. They stepped in, rallied others, and threw me a lifeline. Writing this story is also me broadcasting that lifeline back out—you know, just in case I needed any more incentive.

Among many other things, this is an exercise in challenging a mind that thought itself mapped out in full, confronting the complacency that can sneak into introspection, and accepting that there's always room to refine the recipe. It’s about choosing humility and curiosity and following Belgium’s own JCVD down the road to awareness.

But, make no mistake. I claim no mastery over the process, no enlightened sage status. That's the beauty of it—we don't need it. In fact, fuck status. There's a strange freedom in hitting rock bottom, though. Once you stop believing you're fooling anyone by pretending to have your shit together, keeping up the act becomes pointless. It's an extreme kind of freedom, but hey—might as well get something out of it. Right?

There’s a poster in my living room, a gift from a dear friend. It says, “One percent better every day.” Huge white letters float on a field of black, the message as stark as it is serene. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but so what if I am? Isn’t that what mantras do? Boil the noise away until only what matters remains. More than once a day, I glance at the poster, breathe, and commit once more to keep walking. One step at a time. Eyes forward.

Does this mean I'm now on a steady path to enlightenment? Fuck no. I still fall plenty, still struggle, still fail. But little by little, there's more and more ground between falls. And every time, I get back up a little bit faster and continue the walk.

One step at a time.