Superman

There’s something to be said about the people that come and go in our lives. Constantly, it’s like a revolving door of people that sometimes we notice and sometimes we don’t. Surprisingly, most of the time we don’t notice them until after the fact; like a photo-bomber in the background of a picture until we zoom in and bring them into the foreground. Throughout your life there are always going to be those people: the centers of our pictures and the ones in the background until we bring them to the front. Other times the people in the center become backgrounds until they are so far away we can’t see them anymore. And some people, we never take pictures with because no matter how it feels, they weren’t there long enough to keep hard evidence forever.

The people that keep popping up in your pictures, those are the ones who matter. If you can make a flipbook of your life and see the same people across a span of time, they matter. In the beginning, you might not even realize it. I’ll give you an example. One of my best friends today, I met her in elementary school. We knew each other, in 5^th grade maybe sometimes we hung out, but I was friends with a group of girls who tried to make me someone I wasn’t. I dressed different and acted different and I don’t have any pictures of them anymore. But this girl, she was in a couple of those pictures. Not in the center, maybe not supposed to be in the picture at all, but she was there. I have mental pictures of her breaking her arm after running into a pole. In 5^th grade she was just that silly girl who did silly things and wrote things like “poop is cool” on my DARE shirt. We went to separate middle schools and I probably never thought about her again until high school when our group of friends merged again, through different people this time. Throughout high school she just kept popping up. Sometimes more often than others, sometimes I wouldn’t see her for months. By the time we graduated she was my best friend. After graduation I moved to New York City and still, she was my best friend across 1500 miles. I would come home and see her and she was the same quirky girl with a big heart who was just as confused about life as I was. Now that I’ve been home for more than a year and a half she is more than my best friend. She senses when I need her and she will shoot me a text just to say so. She understands how it feels to need everything and ask for nothing. Those kinds of people, they are the ones who will be in your flipbook until the very end. I have a few people like that and I think that’s all we need.

Others, ones who take up just a year of your life…in the scheme of things that isn’t much. If I live to be 80, that is only 1.25% of my life. The other 98.75% is left to realize what was missing in that picture, or lack thereof, and change it. Change can happen instantly or it can happen over time. Sometimes we have to crash hard into the dirt to finally get it. But no matter how you get there, the end of the tunnel is going to everyone who has always mattered and pictures of how it looked along the way. So keep making pictures. Keep spinning that revolving door. Life and the people in it are just a grab bag with unlimited pulls. Keep pulling. Keep living. And take pictures of it all. You don’t have to show the pictures to anyone or you can show them to everyone. Your choice, your life. But never regret who once was or who isn’t anymore or who will always be. They meant something, or mean something, or stole something, or broke something, and turned you into the you the world sees today. Keep making that person, because someone out there loves the mosaic of you that you’ve created.