My Life In Pieces

Imagine your absolute favorite dress. Now imagine it was a gift from your ex-boyfriend who cheated on you. Would you keep the dress or would you throw it away?

But a dress is low stakes. What if we were to level up the game? How about that habit of yours that you truly love, so much so that it’s part of your identity? Ah, how happy it makes you when you are cozily curled up in your bed with a book and a fresh cup of coffee, or oh, that high you get when you are sitting up on your desk frantically writing all night!

You start thinking about the origins of that habit and you realize the first memory of you ever doing it is closely tied to another, painful memory. Maybe the person who instilled the reading habit in you later ended up hurting you, or maybe you only started writing because you needed an outlet for your trauma.

Maybe those ghazals you are so much into, or that favorite comedian of yours, are just the remnants of an otherwise difficult encounter.

If you are lucky, all the good people and experiences in your life leave only good and happy memories and remnants and all the bad people and experiences leave only sad and unhappy remains.

It does not make your life any less difficult, but it sure makes it easy to decide what to keep and what to cut out.

Complications begin when the good and the bad get mixed up.

How do you then disentangle your memories, your experiences, your habits from the person, experience or relationship that effected them?
How do you differentiate what was theirs from what is yours?
What do you keep? What do you throw away?

Me? I like to think of my world in terms of legos. Every person, every encounter is made up of smaller blocks.
And I have the tools to deconstruct them. I keep the pieces I like and throw away the rest. And this way, block by block, I keep building.

But there is a catch- this works only in retrospect. Looking forward, I can only experience things in full. And looking back, in pieces.