All of Our Missing Pieces

How can we be whole again?

Donte Collins once said, “Loving me isn’t easy. I have sharp edges, I have missing parts.”

It’s true. We choose to give the best parts of us to those we love, hoping they will keep them safe and nurture them better than we ever could. We hope they will fix them if they are in need of care. We hope they will choose to invest themselves in us so that these gifts will in time become so full of joy and light that they will have a life of their own.

But our plans are only as frail as our will and things don’t always work out the way we wish they did. Sometimes the best parts of us get lost, or worse, deliberately broken or stolen from us. They leave voids in us to carry every day with no possibility of reparation or apology. And then we are faced with a choice. We can either become defined by our missing pieces and make it difficult for the ones who stay to love us or allow ourselves to receive these gifts from others so we can be whole again.

Perhaps this is why these tragedies exist; to make us softer and kinder than we could be on our own.