Puzzle Pieces

When you're building a puzzle, you often have a couple of pieces that look very similar in both shape and design -- so similar, in fact, that you can find yourself trying to mash a piece into a space where it looks like it should fit, seems like it should fit, but where it clearly does NOT fit, no matter how you press and wiggle and manipulate. It's just the wrong fit. That's not where it goes.

There are people for whom I am the wrong puzzle piece. While I am a part of the overall pattern of their lives -- carry the same genetic material, am part of the bigger story -- I don't fit into the space that they have reserved for me. I never have, and no amound of manuvering is ever going to make it so.

If you look at those pieces that you've tried to make fit into the wrong spot? They always look a little sad after. Bent. Maybe a little wrinkled. Kind of mashed and as though they've taken a beating.  It's not good for the puzzle piece. So maybe you set it aside, work on the puzzle without it, until it gets lost or forgotten, or you find another home for it.

It's hard to be pushed to the side, but not as hard as it is always to know that you don't fit and never will.

Until, that is, that you remember that the problem is not the puzzle piece. It is not you. The problem is that you're just being put in the wrong place. That somewhere, in the pattern, there is a perfect slot for you, where you link exactly.  Where the pieces around you mesh in harmony. Maybe it's not where anyone expected you to be, but it's where you belong.

Also remember this: that set aside or no, forgotten or not, without you, the picture will never be completed.