Ruins

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a single day, but it burned in one.

Like Rome, a person isn’t built in a day. A person is built through days, weeks, months, and years. Laughter, happiness, love… they build us. They shape and mold us into the person people see when they look us in the eye.

But unlike Rome, we don’t burn in a single day.

No, the pain, the loss, the heartbreaks… they chip away at our cities slowly until the foundation of who we were is gone and our cities are burning.

We collapse from the inside as our minds smoulder and crack from the weight of our shortcomings and self-hatred.

We fall apart slowly, blind to the fact that pieces of ourselves are missing until one day we look into the mirror and don’t recognize the person staring back.

And then, we are in ruins. The memory of our past selves nothing but rubble as we wonder how we fell so quickly.

But it wasn’t quick.

We burned slowly.

We ignored the small signs that we would soon be alone in the dark, only illuminated by the embers of what was once our city of happiness.

We soon realize that the city we built was one without a true foundation. A foundation reinforced with the suffering we thought we were so immune to.

A city built behind walls of ignorance, built with the belief that the elements of life could never possibly breach, is afterall, doomed to fall.

But what can we do from there except rebuild?

What choice do we have but to move forward, dragging the broken pieces of our former selves behind us as we attempt to stack the crumbling rubble once again?

There, in the ruins of who we were, we build ourselves once again brick by brick until the burned ruins are but a distant memory.

We don’t see the change.

We fail to see how much is different until the laughter returns and the lights glow in the streets of the new city.

The city we painstakingly built on the foundation of heartbreak and suffering and hours of tears shed in the dark as we tried desperately to find and resurrect the person we lost when we finally fell.

Newer, stronger walls built of love and determination and the hope we somehow found when we buried our old selves.

And suddenly, after weeks and months spent building and learning and breaking under the weight of our own expectations and forcing ourselves to pick up the pieces and keep going.

Years spent wondering if we’ll ever find happiness again, debating whether or not it’s even worth it to keep going.

Hours of searching for remnants of the happiness that used to fill our city walls, we find it waiting for us where we once stood frail and broken.

At the grave of the stranger we used to see in the mirror.

In the center of our new city, we find our happiness right where we left it. Battered and beaten, shattered and pieced back together, but stronger than ever before.

We find it weaving its way through the streets, dancing in the glow of light that fights its way through the dark streets. While we attempted to piece ourselves back together, it had hidden within every brick we placed as we forced ourselves to move forward.

It never left, but waited patiently for us to see it embedded in the self-love holding the old, broken pieces to the new, stronger ones.

To see that with every broken breath we took and every curse we threw to the sky as we tried to force the broken fragments together again, it was there in the small victories we were too busy to see.

Who we are isn’t built in a single day. But we build ourselves in the ruins of who we were.