So many pieces. Thoughts becoming words becoming sentences and paragraphs and ideas. Translation errors and gaps in logic, lies easily overlooked in the rush to assemble something like a complete picture.
So many lies, so we can pretend to be whole. Pretend to understand who and what we are.
Tried painting a picture and my impatience smudges the lines. My hurry to get to the end misses the point. It’s so easy to become a caricature of yourself in the search for some kind of coherent identity.
It’s always the things you don’t see coming. The things you didn’t expect.
Some small wisdom I learned about while travelling. You meet people, swap stories about the places you liked the best.
Everyone’s excited about Paris, London, New York City. The iconic sites, the pictures on postcards.
But you get there, and it’s nice, sure, but you probably already know everything about it that would have been interesting to learn. You’ve already been there, and even if it’s as good as you hoped, it’s not really new.
Then there’s the little village you stop at in between places, with it’s old chapel sat on a riverbank, where you sit on an unremarkable bench eating some local fare and finally feel like you’ve gotten away.
Then there’s the sleepy little town with an unknown castle overlooking a lake, and gentle rainstorms that felt just like coming home.
The city you never read about feels like the place you want to stay. And of course, the people you meet unexpectedly are prettier than all the paintings in the Louvre.
…
The thing they don’t ever warn you about is how much of you is just like a foreign country. How strange, wild, and deep you have to go to find all the things to make up a whole entire person.
Love is a lot like Paris, except it’s not. Everyone knows the stories, everyone’s heard the tour guide’s spiel and all the dire young romantics get all wistful about how they’ll visit one day. And once you’ve been you realize it’s not all sunsets and beauty and candlelight, that there are bathrooms and people trying to go to work and do their jobs.
That, really, who you’re there with ends up being a lot more important than the place itself. Especially since you’re there with at least yourself.
But love also isn’t anywhere on a map, and it’s a lot bigger than Paris. Even if you manage to find it, it’s easy to get lost. To wake up one day and realize you’re a stranger in the wrong part of town.
Of course there’s lots of other places to get lost too. Stranger and darker than whatever version of love the poets or hallmark or the movies is advertising today. The places you don’t read about in the brochures, that just come up and surprise you.
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