Fragments

(Read the first part of this trilogy - Different, But Still The Same)
There are many of us whose lives look like unfinished pictures.

A little here.

Something promising there.

A beginning over there that never quite became a whole.

We have started many things.

Some were brilliant.

Some were necessary.

Some carried the unmistakable signs of what could have been.

Then, somewhere along the way, they stopped.

A course began.

A project took shape.

An idea found its first breath.

A door opened.

And then, somehow, the picture remained incomplete.

Not empty.

That would almost be easier.

Full of fragments.

Evidence of ability scattered across the canvas.

Promise without completion.

Potential without form.

Enough pieces to imagine the picture, but never enough to stand back and say, There it is.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter burdens we can carry.

Not the knowledge that we had nothing to offer, but the suspicion that we had so much and never quite gathered it into something whole.

So the fragments accumulate.

An unfinished book.

An abandoned plan.

A qualification almost completed.

A dream postponed too many times.

A version of ourselves that appeared briefly and then disappeared.

Each one becomes another piece of the picture.

And the picture just hangs there.

Not destroyed.

Not finished.

Just there.

Waiting.

Perhaps we do not need another beginning.

Perhaps we need the courage to return to the fragments and finally ask what they were always trying to become.