Sometimes when you’re moving forward, shit that seems “backwards” start to make sense.
When I broke up with my first love and later regretted it, the one phrase that kept replaying in my head was, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” It made sense. Until recently the homie said, “If it works better broken, don’t fix it”. You see, that shit made sense too.
I thought about the relationship I was in at the time. To say it was ideal, would’ve been the overstatement of the year. To say I was 100% happy, would’ve been a lie. But apparently, no relationship is perfect. And as much as I complained to my friends about “him,” my friends were also quick to remind me that they just wanted to see me happy and that I was happiest when I talked about “him.” It was more than bumpy, but oddly enough we both held on for the ride.
I want to write about how “broken” we were but it makes me look demanding, unreasonable, ungrateful. Even worse – crazy. Afterall, we didn’t fight, or yell, or call each other names. He was never dramatic, he never belittled me, and I knew he’d never so much as lay a pinky on me. Come to think of it? I didn’t have much to complain about. By no means did we have a dysfunctional “Love the Way You Lie,” relationship … but he did lie at one point, and it had left me dysfunctional the remainder of our time together.
A few years ago rust ate a hole through my car’s exhaust. I was able to get a quick patch up job through a friend of a friend for only $30. It was a cheap fix, and I was able to drive my car again. But if you listened closely, you could still tell something was wrong and about a month later my exhaust/muffler practically broke off while I was driving on the freeway and I found myself at an actual body shop spending over $150 to get it fixed the right way.
You can glue things back together again (with quality time, and genuine effort), or divert your attention away from the flaws by adding shiny baubles to it (like laughter, compliments, and dinner dates). But up close, you’ll still be able to see the cracks and it will eventually fall apart. Because ultimately – it’s still broken.
Unfortunately, there are just some things that get broken beyond repair. Trust is one of them.
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