Our Fractured Lives

We are all broken, but we don’t start out that way.

We enter this world whole, fresh, devoid of any experience or preconception, seeing the world around us for the first time – and that’s the first time we all break. The blank templates of our lives are suddenly filled with color, seeping into every corner as we are fussed over and moved around and made to take in the spontaneous flood of information that just won’t stop, not even for a moment. The color stretches us to our limits, forms cracks in us – thin cobwebs stretching out far and wide, creating fault lines underneath our souls.

We adjust, of course. The never-ending deluge becomes bearable, becomes our definition of normalcy. But now, the cracks have made us vulnerable, and we meet each other, a whole world full of millions upon millions of other people with different cracks, different canvases of fragile glass. Some of those people can shatter us, break off pieces. We might not notice at first, while they’re still there. The pieces can stay lodged in their housing, slipping further and further out until they fall out – until they are taken away by whoever broke it off in the first place. Sometimes they leave unscathed. Other times they leave their own pieces behind, but they never quite seem to fill the holes that need to be filled.

Sometimes we get lucky. We find someone who is broken, too, just like we are, and we fit together perfectly, the jagged edges slotting together like two puzzle pieces waiting to be put together. There might be difficulties, occasionally. Small pieces might chip off as time goes by, but with even more luck, we figure out a way to stick together – even though we might have to snap off pieces of ourselves in the process to fit back together again.

And so we go through our lives, day after day becoming year after year, and we lose more and more pieces of ourselves. Those canvases of our growing ever smaller as we run out of pieces to give away. And we all die, eventually. The canvases of our lives, of our experiences – that first view of the great big world around us, the first kiss at a football game under the stars, the funerals and birthdays of friends and family and strangers, everything that added color and chipped off pieces – they shatter, in the end. No matter how much you managed to hold on to, everything ends. The only thing left is the pieces that others have, the pieces they still hold on to. And every now and again, after more time and more pain and more life, one of those pieces might find another home, and we will be remembered.

And somebody else will be just that tiniest bit whole again.