She wouldn't have thought it possible, but there he was, with his naked bum on the toilet seat, rambling on about the amazing smell of his own processed waste. And she was cracking up with moist eyes.
She hadn't been an emotional person for years, nor had she been one to crack up in that time frame. She had seen the worst, been through it all with her head held high, brushed off the dirt, covered her bruises and kept walking. She hid her pains, she hid her loss, she hid her eyes, and she walked on like it was nobody else's damn business.
You know how you fall once and you get up straight and it takes courage but you jump into the world again. That's not what happened. What happened was that she was smashed into pieces, and left to pick it all up and remake herself from scratch. Which she did, but it told her one thing. That she was not allowed to be happy. That good things happened only to other people. That joy is a debt you have to repay with tears. She was so lost and she was so alone and she had a bag full of old pieces that she could not fit inside her heart again.
Sympathy is a horrible thing. You sympathize with someone you do not understand. When you sympathize, you automatically separate the person from you, creating this position of superiority for yourself from whence to look down upon them. And you throw pity to them like you throw food to the dogs. In a sense, you feel sympathy because you want to feel superior, and you don't have the belly for empathy. And she cleansed her surroundings from all that tried to sympathize with her. She tore apart the last shred of pity she or anyone else had for her, and she marked her territory with the tail of a fiery lioness.
How do you define success? Is it the number on your pay slip? The number of people who report to you? The fear in your competitor's eyes? The love from people who work for you? The difference you make everyday in others' lives? Is it the revenue your company makes? Or is it the explosive growth you drive? Maybe even a combination of everything above? No, success is no absolute, it's what you define in your life to be. And just after a few years of really trying, that remained the only way in which she wasn't successful. She gave everything she had to her work, without counting what she received or what she gave away. She earned it all, and she gave it all away. With something tugging at her heart that she was yet to find true meaning. She was yet to realize the dream she was meant to fulfill.
He didn't just walk in one day wearing a cape and tight overpants. No, he walked in pretty lost in his own world, looking up only when needed, talking to you like you were now under his debt, parsing only his name when in a room full of chatter. That was the first impression anyway. Turns out he could write, even rhyme, and did open his heart when in a gathering of amateur poets. Turns out she would end up sharing her dreams, her deepest self, and her entire life with him. A jigsaw of broken pieces came together, and formed a whole. With repercussions far beyond her sophisticated imagination, extending all the way to narcissistic ramblings about processed human waste. God has his ways.
She wasn't cracking up because it was funny, but because she was just happy. And her eyes were moist because she couldn't believe she could feel this way.
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