Up in the Air

Chapter 34

Dedicated to The_Aristocrat. It's finally here but you're not. I miss you. Come back.

The inspirations to Julian's photo project are in the media bar along with yours truly (yes, me) reading Sara's essay below (with Sara Bareilles' Gravity in the background).

Chapter 34

"More"

Anonymous

The best part about you ... is that you remind me we are all human.

Humans are made of DNA and layers and walls and secrets and memories and opinions and thoughts and emotions and relationships and wants and needs and loves and hates and undefineds and infinites – a recipe without precise ingredients or measurements, one that makes us all heartbreakingly beautiful.

You somehow came with an extra helping of everything that comes into making a person and so, while I am learning amidst a hazy fog of confusion, it is a lesson I am more than happy to struggle with.

Through you, I realized we are made of things that music cannot embody, that art cannot imitate, that words cannot contain and that photographs cannot capture.

Yet we all still try.

Trying is what makes it breathtaking.

The best part about you ... is that you know who you are but, really, you don't.

You are confident and hesitant, cynical and trusting, magnetic while you push people away, blessed with so many things even as you're deprived of a lot more, knowledgeable from experience and yet naive through the hope you deny you have.

You are a pull of so many tensions, it is amazing you're still whole.

The most wondrous part is that no one knows of the struggle you go through just to stay in one piece. You have fought against those who raised you, who tried to mold you into a shape you know you will never be; you have fought against perception and prejudice; and, too many times to count, you have even fought me.

There is no battle more graceful than that of trying to hold on to the fragments of what makes us who we are even when everything around us screams that it is impossible.

Yet you still keep trying.

And so you become even more breathtaking.

The best part about you ... is how you make me feel about myself.

Looking at you is like I'm staring at my own reflection. The flaws jump at me at first. The imperfections. The shackles and steel cables that weigh me down. The things that make me feel horrible about myself.

All of it is magnified by innumerable degrees until it begins to overpower me and I want nothing but to surrender.

But parts of myself I never knew I loved – never knew I should come to love – suddenly come at me, refusing to be ignored, demanding to be recognized, stared at and treasured.

The good things – the really wonderful things –pop up like a mushroom, like you.

Inside of me, the good never defeats the bad like all the storybooks have said. They both live together in a dance for dominance, wrapped around each other so tightly until they're inseparable. Until they become indistinguishable.

You have taught me I will never be just pure as white or just black as sin; I will never be just one thing.

I am a combination of everything that makes me who I am – gray – and I am perfectly fine with that.