When you grow up with nothing
you really do appreciate everything -
however, everybody always has something,
everybody always has someone,
everybody always has moments that they look back on
and people from their life that stand out
because they had a profound effect on them...
when some people are born
they are surrounded by shiny things -
but sometimes little to no love to be found;
when some people are born
they do not know that in comparison
to other people of the same age
their parents do not have the same means
to give them what other children have -
but it doesn't matter
because what they have
and what they will always have is
a connection, a bond, a hidden but important
history and a tapestry that only they know.

When we want to discover more about ourselves
we look in, we look out, we look back -
just like astronomers looking up to
the starlit sky of the cosmos
and the infinity of space
and the wonders to be revealed -
and we try to recapture times,
experiences, relationships, feelings;
but once something has happened
it is always hard to see and to recount
every detail of everything,
because our own internal storyteller
has a way of dramatising and often
romanticising things in such a way
to make them seem better or worse than they were.

When a person lives their life
they always discard pieces of themselves
that they have collected and acquired over the years -
fingerprints that could be used to identify them,
such as: messages, photographs, souvenirs, memories -
things that though they may have wanted to lose,
they kept a hold of
because they still felt a longing to return
to the same place and the same time,
with the same people, they
once visited, and loved,
and might still love.

When someone's world implodes
there are always fragments of them
and the world that they knew
strewn in every direction
and left for others to come along
and pick up afterwards and continue
their journey in some way -
such as incorporating them into a story,
or repurposing them and recycling them
so that they can be used over and over again -
and all my life I have witnessed this
and I see the value in using what others
no long have a reason to keep,
and now that I am older and I fully understand
what in life truly matters
I know what it means to take the bits
and the pieces of other people's lives
and fold them into our own,
because there is so much to be learned
from picking up seemingly random things
and putting together a new puzzle -
especially to those who are adept
at using their imagination and
creating new stories
from the tatters of others.