I think that people are made up of all of these little pieces. Likes art. Spends an hour getting ready in the morning. Listens to Rise Against. Always exactly 5 minutes late. Adores the smell of cinnamon. Needs company to work. Can't sleep without a light. All of these little things. Behaviors, traits, quirks.
And I think each time we meet someone who becomes a significant part of our lives, we exchange these pieces. Sometimes we trade them. Or we share them. Or we develop new ones together. So two friends who were completely different when they met often come out in the end with many similarities. And the longer you stay connected to someone, whether you see them every day or talk to them every night or spend every waking moment thinking about when you'll see them next, you start to have so many pieces in common that it's sometimes hard to tell who's who and where each piece came from.
All of this is logical. It makes sense. And it seems to happen pretty consistently. What gets interesting is what happens when two people drift apart. Whether they just don't see each other regularly anymore or if they had a falling out. The pieces don't always stay the way they were. When two people were so close as to match so extensively in their collections of pieces and they move on to lead separate lives, some pieces are held onto greedily, others are discarded, and some just fall away.
Some people hoard them. Because they want to hold on to the person they left or they just like the person they themselves became. Others find the habits, the tastes, and all of the small things slowly just fading, falling away. Suddenly there is nothing maintaining that particular piece, so it simply disappears. And some people drop the pieces immediately, they cast them away. They can't stand to eat what was just their favorite food or listen to what was their favorite song. They find themselves unable to say certain words or go to particular places. The piece is hastily discarded, buried, thrown aside. It causes too much pain, because it is too much associated with the person it was shared with, and so it is ignored.
Sometimes it happens that a person lets go of so many pieces that there's nothing left. Then they have to rebuild everything. Their habits. Their tastes in food, music, activities. Their quirks and overused sayings. Everyone has them, some people just rebuild them each time. They start back at the beginning and assemble themselves from the foundation up. They start with what they can't change and start adding things, oftentimes as different as possible from what they had before.
All this because if, by chance, they happened to pick up one of those pieces again, it would all come rushing back. All of the memories. Everything good and everything bad. Everything they never wanted to remember and always wanted to forget. Every piece is reminiscent of a person, each person tied to a part of their life that was set aside and moved past. Picking up a piece is asking to get cut again.
So each time, they drop everything. And start all over again. From the very beginning.
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