A Puzzling Notion

People are puzzles– only you lost the box, so you have no picture, and you only get the pieces one at a time, in no particular order.

Not everybody has the same number of pieces, or even the same type. There are no edges or corners to work from, and sometimes you let your hopes get the best of you.

You start to fill in the empty spaces of people’s puzzles with what you would ideally like to see there. It means you start to force pieces to go where they clearly don’t fit, only to have them fall into place perfectly where you least expected, revealing a picture you didn’t even consider, and usually one you do not like.

See, if you just had the box, and could have seen the completed picture beforehand, maybe you wouldn’t have spent all that time trying to piece together a puzzle that was not at all what you thought it was. But alas, people are box-less puzzles.

So you get to thinking about your own puzzle― how many of those you call friends have put together even half of it? How many even bother to try?

The thing is, you always crave that person that manages somehow to effortlessly piece your puzzle together― even better than you would have done it youself― without even a thought as to what piece goes where, as you do the same with their own. You figure each other out equally quick, and grow to be quite fond of the other’s completed picture.

But people aren’t really puzzles.

People change― they are not still images, frozen frames that wait patiently for you to figure them out.

That’s why there can never be a box in the first place; you have to fall in love with the pieces themselves-- the core building blocks of a person. That way you can never be startled when an unexpected image forms― no image can be unexpected when you have no expectations.

You have to love and appreciate all the pieces for all the potential images they can make―no matter how they fall, no matter how they arrange themselves, no matter what picture forms. Otherwise… well, you don’t really love them. You only love the picture that their pieces formed at some point in time, forgetting that there were even pieces to begin with.

And when an external force interferes with the puzzle, like a bored child sweeping all the pieces to the floor, of course the picture gets shaken up-- you can’t expect it to stay the same, and you sure as hell can’t blame the person for having their puzzle pieces all strewn about. What you can do is help them put their puzzle back together. And who knows? Maybe after such chaos and turmoil they’ve realized that some pieces were not at all in the right place, or that the whole puzzle was upside down, or even that an entirely different picture is now possible for them to piece together.

It’s losing a piece of the puzzle, though, that’s the worst. Some people try to find a similar piece, wedging it hopelessly where the old one used to be, but it’s just not the same. It never will be. However much you'd like to see that empty space filled once more, you can’t bring that piece back.

Some people will always have holes in their puzzles, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I was hoping to end on a happier note, but what can I say.. I guess my puzzle’s just got too many holes.