It’s easier to love the stranger on the metro. He’s wearing these great boots and hes got glasses with tiny black frames. He’s reading a novel you can’t quite see the name of, but it’s quite thick and you see that he’s on the last few chapters. He looks up every once and a while and occasionally your eyes meet. He’s traveling light and you wonder where he’s going. You imagine his entire life. You romanticize him, you imagine he can sing, that he’s kind to his mother, that he’d be a great lover. Just as easily, the the subway stops and he exits the car. He’s gone and he leaves you feeling certain he would have been the perfect man for you. If he’d stayed longer, if you’d asked him to coffee, it would have been a storybook romance. We forget the subtle realities of other people. He’s an awful conversationalist, he can’t balance his checkbook, his last relationship ended because he cheated, he hates your favorite movie and his friends have always been his first priority, not her, not you. These flaws are lost on us, lost on the ideas we have in our head of who someone is. Sometimes, even when we know someone, we forget these flaws, we ignore them, we tell ourselves, that’s not really who he is. We try to mold other people, we try to fit them into the frame we already created for them. The problem is, an 18X24 painting will never fit into an 8X10 frame. You’d have to reshape it, cut it down, destroy it. We must learn to be fair to the ones we love, we must understand the difference between who they are and who we want them to be.
— (via erinmurdock)
(via dormi-verte)
