I have not been on this island in what feels like months.
Getting off that airplane felt so good. That velvet breeze blowing all the busy-ness off me. The people I know by face only in the airport greeting me with a “Good Night”, because they know I belong here. That’s one of the things about a small island, they know your face. I must’ve fallen in love with this feeling long ago in the small town I came up in, but back then I couldn’t see beauty the way I do now.
It feels good to have someone know your face, it feels good to be known in all ways.
I went home for an extended trip. I love my family, they are some of my favorite people. There is something about someone who knows your whole story. Sure, you can be an asshole, but they have seen your foundation, they know what bricks went in. They know how hard you were to build, and how many times you’ve been knocked down.
We are all f*cked up in our own way though, we all have those bricks that weren’t laid by the kindest of hands. Sh*t, sometimes we were even built by the wrecking ball itself. The world can be an interesting builder, and in the process of our masterpiece we can be leveled, hard. I learn that everyday we all have our sh*%, we all have our highs and lows, but what defines us as who we are is how we chose to rebuild. Do we make ourselves more beautiful and magnificent or do we decide to say “f*ck it”, pitch a tent, and survive?
Holding on for dear life. A refugee.
No one ever leaves childhood unscathed, you hopefully don’t leave your twenties unscathed, and, if you’re doing it right, you don’t leave your thirties without scars, and so on. Because if we don’t, we aren’t putting it out there. We aren’t being real or vulnerable enough. We are able to give our childhood to our parents as that is their shit, and probably a little from the generations behind them, but everything else? That’s ours. That is our story, and if we don’t have a plot when we die, that means we existed, we didn’t live.
Finding the happiness in it all shouldn’t just be at the ending, it should be throughout, weaved in the funerals as well as the weddings. People are weird at funerals, you’re in the room with a dead person and no one acts like it is not f*cked up. That’s funny.
I’ll take a lifetime of f*ck ups over a lifetime of boredom, and at the end of it all, I’ll take the laughter and pain over convenience.
