Beautiful Ferocity

It’s not that the world is full of pain, or that it’s unjust. It’s not that timing and fate and biology often make us feel as if we were created to be the universe’s personal in-joke. Or worse, its whipping boy or girl.

It’s that there are sometimes these people in it. So many more of them than you realize.

Born with minds quick and clever and delightfully odd, hearts purer and more perfect than the most rarified air. Good beyond even the limits of even their own imaginations. Beacons of light, born into a world of dark mirrors and hulking shadows.

They start out, innocently, openly displaying all that they are, unaware of their own magnetically attractive qualities, of how darkness is drawn to envelop light. They’re not given a warning, a lesson; they’re put out there, untrained, unprepared for the desire and jealousy, the angry neglect and disregard their perfection can inspire.

And so it begins. They stand there, gleaming china figurines in a bull shop. Feeling the ground shake beneath them as hulking, brutish figures stomp by, reach out, handle them far too roughly, until the cracking begins. The chipping, the breaking in half and gluing back together. The shattering into many pieces and left alone to reassemble on one’s own. So hard to do, near impossible—resulting in their putting back their own pieces all mixed up, confused, so that they’re still there, showing some kind of resemblance to a whole, but one so jumbled and confused and so apparently unlike where they started that they begin to not even recognize themselves.

They forget where they began, who they are, truly, at the core. They begin to believe that they are ugly. And that it’s their ugliness that continues to allow them to be crushed and broken. They begin to believe their definition has only ever been ugly and broken.

So they revel in that. They glue themselves back together each time, a little more en mass, a little more confused and disordered, but in a way that appears to be more solid, less likely to allow for major damage. They deliberately make themselves more dense, more grotesque, to perhaps make it so no one will see anything good anymore; no one will pick them up again, call them beautiful, and then smash them into the ground. It becomes a matter of pride. Who can be the most grotesquely damaged? Who can be the hardest? Who gives a fuck? You can’t make me worse than I already am. Bring it on. Throw me. Break me. Just try. If you do, if you don’t…it means nothing.

And behind all of this, this callousness, anger, bravado, deliberate ugliness, pride, challenge…behind it all, only two real things: the fear of yet another rough, unlovely hand leading to rough, hard floor; and the painfully strong longing, despite it all, to be picked up, caressed, valued as the thing they started as, still hidden down there somewhere at the core. To have some observer hold them, look closely, gently, and say, “I see you. Love.” And lay them back down again, gently, like the rare, precious thing they are. To not let them fall.

Those people. The way they fight, despite only lingering memories of what was good and right in them, to not give that old, vague hint of their own perfection and worth up. That tiny glowing nucleus of intense power inside them, that makes them keep building themselves back up, despite the odds, just in case…maybe, maybe. That un-nameable thing that ensures, even should they be smashed into powder and stomped into the ground, that they push themselves back up from under the earth again, as something new, pale, wet, and green…always rising up.

That beautiful ferocity, the refusal to give up hope of recognizing themselves again; of being recognized. This, for me, is the closest evidence that the word “miracle” has meaning.

These people are all around you. You’re one of them. You’re that fucking beautiful.

And I guess by default, that means I am, too.


(Photo credit: Sapling, by scragz)