Kaleidoscope

Maybe we’re not all broken

Maybe we’re exactly where we need to be

For all the broken pieces to come together like a kaleidoscope

So we can see all the magic this world has to offer

I may be broken, but all the pieces are there. I just don’t know how to put them back together. I know they may not fit back together they way they were before, but that’s okay. Before wasn’t as good as who I am today, and tomorrow I’ll be even better. And the day after that. And the day after that.

All these broken pieces, people keep finding them, and bringing them back to me. Little pieces of my heart, things I thought I stopped believing in a long time ago, fragments of dreams and fairy tales that long since washed away in a sea of tears and a life of hardships buried far underneath a picture-perfect pretty exterior with an undercurrent of rumors and lies that anyone who knows me never believed anyway. Even when I didn’t believe in myself. But I do.

I’ll never stop fighting for you. Or you. Or you. And for a change it seems there’s a few people actually fighting for me too. A friend who gives me a hug and wraps around my heart in a way that makes me feel like perhaps affection isn’t a bad thing, or a reason to recoil and run away, afraid of what being even a little bit close to another human being may mean. A friend who walks in the back door just as I hung up the phone crying with another friend who’s struggling and insists I am not to just get in the car and drive because I don’t care if it’s three minutes or three hours away – I have your back. Friends that tell me they have my back – and for the first time in my life, actually show up too. Show up when a week long of plans fall apart at the last minute and I go from looking forward to a day with family to a day with almost no one – that turns out to be a lot more than no one after all. Someone who always answers my messages, even when I’m too much, too extreme, too something, too everything the way I always am to everyone (or almost everyone) around me.

I don’t know that I still believe in fairy tales, but I suppose I’m still looking for one. I’m just looking through a kaleidoscope of all of the broken pieces of me that I don’t know how to put together, but I still believe there’s magic there somewhere. People can see it, I think. My friends can, I believe that. We’re all broken somehow in our own ways. It’s what we choose to do with all of those broken pieces that really matters.

Sometimes I cut myself on those broken pieces. Other times, I trip over them and fall down in a heap, defeated and crying. Other times I answer the phone and talk a friend off a ledge, or through the hell they are going through, because they’ve done that for me before too and I know they’d do it again – they’d do it right now even – even when they are so broken themselves they have nothing else to give because the world and life has swallowed them whole. Every single piece of the broken bits of me, the broken bones, broken body, broken heart, and broken dreams is still a part of who I am and when the moonlight hits those pieces just right, I can still shine. I think.

I’ll always wish on stars. I’ll always hope that tomorrow will bring something more. I believe that there’s more to life than going through things alone, always being the strong one, the one everyone can lean on, the one who gets left behind the minute the going gets tough or someone else around the corner has something more fun to do. But tonight I did something different. I stood still. I stayed home. And for a change I felt like there was something I could offer this world that wasn’t just a pile of broken glass and shattered pieces that will cut you when you try to hold them because that’s what broken things do. They hurt. And sometimes, they inadvertently hurt the very same people that are trying to hold them and put them back together.

Maybe I don’t need to be put back together. Maybe this is just who I am. Maybe, all these pieces are coming together in their own way, a new way, like a kaleidoscope that transforms all the nightmares and tragedies of the past into this beautiful amazing life that just shines brighter even on a moonless night in the rain as we head into October.

It’s almost October. The wind howled as I walked up my mountain in the late afternoon sun the other day, screaming that change was coming. Whistling through the trees, warning everyone to be prepared. Stand tall, stand proud, own who you are, let go of those skeletons, stop chasing the ghosts of the past and the people in the present that haunt you in the same ways you keep finding the big jagged pieces that never want to be a part of any magic and only want to see you to hurt you and tear you down.

Stop falling for people who mirror the skeletons of your past.

Start falling for the person who shows up and sees your soul.

I’m right here.