Flavors

There is no one in the universe who can truly, honestly, genuinely, deeply, experience our pain, our anger, our hurt, our humiliation, our hopelessness, our hopefulness, our joy, our dreams, our nightmares.

 

Each of us is truly having our own unique journey through life.  For each of us, every moment is a singular voyage into the unknown.  We all wake up to another day, and every moment of that day is a completely one-of-a-kind experience.  Even shared experiences are not really shared, as each person, as an individual, hears, absorbs, handles, feels, sees, reacts, responds, understands, in a totally unique way, and no two experiences will ever even be close to similar.

 

We have all known our own flavor of joy, sorrow, love, hate, hurt, pain, heaven, hell, prison, war.  It’s a flavor only we know, only we experienced, only we ever tasted.  And we live it and breath it and feel it and taste it so deeply, so passionately, so thoroughly, we don’t understand how others can’t know the facts, see them seeping from our pores, recognize our scars, see the evidence right before their eyes.

 

A world full of people, and we stand all alone.  How can we carry all of this pain, all this hurt, all this guilt, all this shame, all of this burden, all alone?  How can we survive these memories, these horrors, these nightmares, without losing our minds and the last pieces of our souls?

 

So we reach out, desperately hoping to connect, to be seen, to be heard, to be understood, to be recognized, to be felt, to be comforted, to be nurtured.  We gather in pairs, in groups, in masses, to communicate our needs, our desires, our thoughts, our opinions, our beliefs, our prejudices, our interests.  We bleed our pain onto canvas, channel our rage in print, mold our hope in clay, we sing, dance, write, create, leave a footprint, something that says we were here, we participated, we loved, we lost, we mattered, we were. 

 

But at the end of the day, we’re still all alone, alone with our own particular flavor of life, of which no one can ever taste the true essence.