We are yesterday’s leftovers.
Born on this earth without having a say in the choice to be put here, we are brought to life screaming and innocent. We haven’t lived, and the marks on the world have yet to be left by our hands or left on our skin as reminders of what we have survived. As the years roll forward, some days feeling like seconds and others feeling like an eternity, we condition ourselves to the world around us. Slowly pieces of ourselves are left in each place that we have been. With every childhood scrutiny and event that we endure, we leave a piece of ourselves with it. We are shrinking as we grow. We carry this tradition into adulthood. Every experience has a cost. We pay for the years that we live by losing fragments, one grain of skin at a time. We may look whole, but there are footprints left everywhere we have stumbled and walked, learned and lived.
We make choices, some good, and some bad, but all with consequence. We choose how to spend our years, staring down the barrels of guns or establishing a divot in a sofa, those are all choices. With every choice that we make to be present in one place, we are giving up another ending to our story. The consequence of time. Slowly we erode, fortifying ourselves with memories that we embellish with meaning. Memories that can be nightmares or fantasies. They permeate our minds and keep us company when we can’t fall asleep at night. We like to think that our memories are our own, but when you’re haunted you inadvertently haunt everyone else around you when you can’t be present. You’re not present because you’re previously occupied within the halls of your own head. Those around you are in the company of the ghost of a once whole being, trying to remember what he is.
The pieces we lose cause holes, and these holes are wounds. Ive never been able to separate myself from the ranks of the broken. I was born into the role. Unbeknownst to me, I was always going to lose myself along the way, like dust, one particle at a time. I gave it freely, ignoring the cost. I’ve spent my entire life trying to find a way back to wholeness and completion, and only lately have I realized that you can’t. You can put on the armor of a uniform or humor, but your sins are still there making shapes of a whole body beneath the facade. I have learned that it takes a wounded person to understand another who is wounded, truly. It is a potent sense of irony, and I can’t quite fathom why it is such a recurring theme. There are humans that I have known, precious humans, who had been torn apart from the inside and somehow found a way to put the pieces back into a functional whole. More often than not, they gravitate toward caregiving in some capacity. They are healers by nature, as they have walked the embered coals before, and know what it means to have someone to bandage your wounds after you have walked through hell. It’s like this: in order to heal, you have to hurt. It is some twisted part of the grand design that pushes shattered souls toward the therapy of human stewardship. They have all fought something, struggled through, and may still be fighting, but there they are, reaching out a helping hand to someone who may have fallen behind them. Their fights were dark and laden with burden. Those burdens were screaming for an ear to hear them or they were painfully quiet, but those burdens were wars that they endured and survived. They have all fought for something and they have struggled without knowing whether they could survive it, but here they are, shining light into the darkness. The broken tend the broken, always mending the holes and the wounds. Those who are hurt become the healers. It is catharsis with intention. Hope for help. I reluctantly consider that I am one in their ranks. It isn’t fortune, I think that it is a necessity of grief.
The cost can be high, and the only bandage that I can think of to treat the shattered facades of normalcy that left us longer ago than we care to realize is the bandage of wisdom. Wisdom is earned. You can’t buy it, and you can’t manufacture it. You have to bleed for it. It’s the only thing worth the blood. Love is wisdom. We love when we know we shouldn’t, and we love because we know that it’s the only thing that matters. We are wise to the love, we love with intention. I would like to label myself as a philosopher. The word at its root means “The love of Wisdom”. Philo Sophia. I haven’t earned those stripes yet, and perhaps I never will. I am just a broken human experiencing himself. I’ll continue to love against the odds, and it seems that I am destined to offer a hand when I can’t afford to. It’s the only thing that helps me to feel like I can fill the holes left from losing the pieces of myself over a lifetime. We are the leftovers from yesterdays self, the broken healers.