Never not new. Never not the stranger. The kid from overseas who looks normal but speaks weird.  The unbaptized kid at the Catholic school, mouthing liturgy at morning mass because I’ve never heard it before (and imagine the brass of my parents to have straight up lied to the superintendent to get me a placement.) The one with weird hair. The nerd. The suck-up (I never, because if you’re a clever and quiet student, the teachers will suck up to you.) 

The drop-out.

But it’s not a bad thing. None of these are bad things. I don’t put much faith in categories like bad/good, which seem firm and logical but are wholly subjective. It is, as one says, as it is.  This is what happened, and it cannot be changed.

So then why do I say these events I describe ‘ruined’ me?  Ruining implies a pristine state that can be defiled. To say a woman is ‘ruined’ used to (and in many cases still does) mean that she fucked before her wedding day.  Ruined cities litter the earth, relics of human ambition, testaments to mortality’s deft hand and the way that all things end.  Was I ever whole? Pristine? Or was that bit about Original Sin saying something else? 

We are all stardust, strung together in fragile molecular webs that break and heal and break and heal and break until they cannot heal.  No wonder we die, for surely it becomes too much, this being alive, this always being given things to touch and lose and want and find.  We die and become stardust again. Is that the ruin?  My too clear seeing of these webs, my fervent need to say “look, do you see the glory woven through it all?”

I believed in other worlds.  All these things were proof.  These moments, these shifts, these odd exposures I call the things that ruined me.  Evidence that other worlds were real and that you could go to them. That nothing I saw around me had to be the way it was. That the future was full of more than the present could hold.

Is it the future yet?