Sticky

We are all patchwork dolls, hodgepodges of the world we walk through.

I suppose that by that description, we were all born empty and bare and blank.

And sticky. We were all born very sticky, like balled-up strips of two-sided tape, constantly reaching out greedy, starving fingers for bits of dust and tiny ripped pieces of paper and little coils of string.

But unlike two-sided tape, our greedy, starving fingers reach out for something more substantial than forgotten scraps left underneath antique couches. We search, instead, for those opalescent pearls that only life can offer, those shiny moments in between the quotidian junk that composes the majority of existence. We shuffle through piles of ordinary and mountains of unremarkable, hunting down those bright pinpricks of excitement, of happiness, of progress, that when we find, we latch on to. We armour ourselves in these beautiful, dazzling fragments of exceptional that represent the best of this world and we treasure them like the gems that they are. Our natural stickiness holds them close, gathers them in, and cherishes them for what they are, and for what they to mean to us.

But accidently, unnecessarily, mournfully, we are too sticky. We don’t often have a choice when it comes to the things that attach themselves onto our lives, and for every new spark of life we are lucky enough to find, there are miles upon of miles of ground in between to cover. All of this time spent unmarked by glittering new discoveries is time where pieces of the world latch onto us. Unbidden, perhaps, but here to stay.

Sometimes there are valleys of deepest dark that we must traipse through, and sometimes the hideous night creatures snag on our throats and catch in our hair. We try to shake them off, peel their rusted, jagged claws away from the treasures that we have already acquired, but they are tenacious and our skin is adhesive and they will not go.

Sometimes we trek through winding rusted mazes in search of the prize that waits at the end, and to find our way, we bring along pieces that we plan to discard after all is said and done. The edge of a song, the corner of a map, a tatter of cloth; all the things that will fall away once in the face of the true awards. We wave them carelessly in the wind, fold them until they crease, not realizing that these will eventually stick and become a part of us, for sometimes, the reward of the journey is equal of the result.

And then sometimes, most times, there are the small things. The tiny, seemingly insignificant shards that stick to us along the way. The miniscule beads of matted hues that slip by the glossy edges, and become a part of us unknowingly, burrowing in to just the right places to make an unprecedented impact. Each one is small, barely the size of the tip of a fingernail, and rather plain, but we are unable to let them go. The color of each alone is unremarkable, but with so many different ones scattered across our skin, they intercept the light that hits them and they glow. The big pieces are few and rare; it is this collection of small things that make up most of the being that we are.

We are sticky, and if we were not, we would live our lives forever blank.

We are all patchwork dolls, and we will always have some surface space left for new pieces, new memories.