broken

we all have things to do, places to go. 
people to be. 

and then there's some of the others, the ones who show up now and then. the occasional status update, blog post. a friend we caught up with after too long who mentions what he'd heard. a mention in Midday. 
the ones who did what they wanted. what we wanted. 

and when they intrude into our consciousness, so rudely shouldering aside all the comfortable preconceptions of all we held dear about our goals and place in life, it's a complex feeling. 
we're happy for them. they are friends, after all, and they did got something, did something extraordinary. 
we're also envious, because sometimes we want to be the one standing there. we want our face in the photograph, our name in the air. it's a reminder of the things we still have to to do, the things we now never will do. 
we love them because they're our past, and we hate them because they could have been our future. 

the broken ones. 
it takes something extraordinary to get to somewhere extraordinary, to do that something great. greatness is not a comfortable condition, not a soft, gentle, 'approved' state. greatness is a bitch. greatness drives us with curses and a whip, strips the fat from our flesh and later, the flesh from our souls. it drives us while we live, it drives us bleeding and struggling to our deaths, and it drives the spark that makes us what we are beyond that. 
it breaks us first, because the smooth, functioning, well-oiled cog the world wants us to be, that keeps everything moving along, is not what does great things, is not capable of achieving the extraordinary. 
it's only after we break, after we no longer fit in with the engine of the world, that we are free to walk that different path. 
we call them sacrifices. the family, the relationships, the career, the retirement plan. the house and the car, the degrees and the diplomas, the promotions, bonuses and increments. these are all the things we drop, we tear ourselves free of. 
it hurts. every one thing left behind is a rebirth, with all the blood and screams that come with it. 
some people are born just once, into that one life. 
others suffer their rebirths again and again, for a;ll the new lives they bring. 

but we don't see the agony, the suffering, the self-doubt and the regret, the failures. we just see the end, and it mocks us with the mirror it holds up to ourselves. 

but. 

but. 

did you think you were the perfect one? seriously? everyone has choices we chose. mistakes we made. 
secrets in the deep dark of our hearts, words and faces that will never see the light again except for those times when we revisit them, alone, in silent nights while our world sleeps around us. 
the world we so carefully put together. 
the perfect world that shouts out, i am whole, complete, all there. there's nothing wrong with me. 

but there's something wrong, isn't there?
something wrong with everyone. 
we all want that perfection, but nobody's perfect. we all want that shining glossy well-rounded life that everyone aspires to, but we know that under that pristine surface is things we did not do, people we left behind, choices we didn't make and hearts we broke. 

we want to build fairytale palaces on shifting sands. we do. 

we don't need to pity the broken ones their hard choices, or envy them their dreams. 
we are the broken ones. 
all of us.