Gathering pieces
The longer I live, the more dull days I see pass, the more I long for somebody to validate me completely, to accept me whole and give me enough space to grow where I know I'm flawed. To stop receiving support little by little, always having to look for somebody else when we've reached our patience's limit and I still feel starved. Is it too late to just now realize that this is pretty much impossible to get? Nobody else knows what I've experienced the way I remember it, with the same conclusions I have come to. Even people with the same burdens as me haven't been able to agree on everything.
The girl I've talked to recently, that understands what it feels to be perpetually clumsy and disoriented, could never offer me the space to rant about balancing my family's plans for me with what I want out of my own life. She is still too young, a couple of steps behind from what I've lived.
The boy that understands what it feels like to look at yourself in the mirror and never be sure if you'll ever be whole, could never understand what it felt like to lose years of your life while you were taking care of another person, leaving your identity to deteriorate completely. He has always given himself room to be selfish.
The divorced woman that knows too well how ruthless and sudden a breakdown in a relationship can be, how hopeless it feels to pick up yourself again and believe that you can find love again, could never understand what it is like to feel detached and alien your whole life. She knows why she feels the way she does and lets herself be consumed by it.
Maybe it's because I try to fulfill this when I have a partner, that I wish for it to be reciprocated. Maybe that is why I feel betrayed when they can't keep up in return. Even when I know that trying to do it will leave you exhausted. That it will wear you down, slowly, withering away your life like you're left to rot in the sun.
Only now I can see that I ought to take the pieces from every person and start attaching them together. Nobody will offer me a completed puzzle.