The sky outside seems to fall a little bit closer just before the sun comes up. I know, I’ve seen it more times than I care to admit. But really, few will ever admit to real sleeplessness, the sort that has you up for weeks, that drains you of colour and life and energy and leaves you thin. No one really wants to admit that, no matter how romanticised it becomes in the teen-lit prose shit that love-sick kids call literature. “I’m an insomniac”, they cry after a night of tossing and turning, maybe getting two or three hours in. “I’m depressed”, they say after a bad day, as if having something broken in their lives is charming. Endearing even.
Show me the man who taught them that loving is easier when a person is broken. Show me the man and I’ll show you his grave. When you’re lowered into the ground, or scattered into the wind, that’s broken, and I’ll tell you what, that’s not easy to love. It doesn’t sustain anything. Not lust or anger or passion or affection. Nothing. Of all the broken things in the world, we don’t need any more privileged kids thinking they’ve got it tough, thinking that because some pretty girl spurned their advances their life is a wreck.
We have broken windows and buildings and god knows how many broken countries. We have broken stars and broken buckets and taps that leak and penises that do the same when they all get old. We all get old. But broken? I think not. Crooked, though. That’s something we should all get used to saying. Crooked is something we all are. Crooked, and in one piece. Well, except for amputees and people who’ve just got their teeth punched out. I grew up believing that there were good people in the world, and there were bad people. Good and bad. East and west. Hot and Cold. Opposite ends of the spectrum. I was wrong. I wish I could blame my mother for that, but when she wasn’t telling me my bedtime stories, she was well and truly drunk. As truly truthful as she was ever going to get, my father said as he walked out our front door, not even bothering to shut it but kissing me goodbye before he left. Crooked.
We’re all as good and as bad as the next person, I think. It’s just a matter of how you choose to live. But no one is completely good. No one is completely bad. Except some of those teen-poets, seven hells, some of them are shit. But still, I think we’re more crooked than broken. Broken is hard to love. Broken means loving pieces, pieces that may never see wholeness again, pieces that you have to love as separate entities, shattered and confusing and most of them don’t make enough sense to even try understand it. And the good and the bad in a person? They’re all separate pieces now, open for someone to come along and take and love and cherish all the good parts, rejecting the bad. And what happens when a person finds out those bad parts belong to the same person whose good bits they’ve loved so well? I told you that you can’t love a broken thing.
But crooked? You can be bent all out of shape, you can take all the knocks in the world but still, you’re in one piece. It’s easier to make sense of all those different bits when they’re in one piece. And let me tell you something. We’re all in one piece. Well, except for those amputees and the fools that really shouldn’t have said those things to the guy who had more drinks and gym memberships than him. And because we’re in one piece, we can be both good and bad. Good and bad and loved for all the grey in a person, for all the times when we try to be good but end up staining our knees and getting blood on our hands, for swearing after present-time at a kids birthday party and even for writing terrible poetry that should be burnt rather than read.
We must take it all, love it all and try not to be broken, because only glasses and fingernails are really good at that. So, crooked friend, you must love your crooked neighbour with all your crooked heart if you ever want to get any real love in this world.
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