Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

“Do you like things the way they are? Because if you do, by all means, carry on. But if you don’t, nothing’s going to change until you decide to make it change.”

Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

But the past piles up, it builds a ladder to where you are now; without it, how would you get anywhere? Without it, who would you be? Can you really start new and leave your past behind?

All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

She wasn’t good or bad, he decides: Life is more complicated than that, there are endless shades of gray that comprise a human being.