The Older I Get, The Less I Trust Perfect Things

The older I get, the less interested I am in perfect things.

Perfect things don’t tell me anything. They haven’t been tested. They haven’t broken. They’ve never had to decide, at 2am, whether to keep going.

Give me the chipped mug over the one still in the box. Give me the surfboard that’s been stitched back together after kissing the reef. The motorcycle with a dent in the tank and a story about the dent. Books with bent spines and somebody’s handwriting crammed into the margins. Wrinkled hands. Crooked smiles. Tattoos that mean something. Scars that have stopped apologizing for themselves.

I find beauty in people who’ve changed their minds.

People willing to burn down a version of themselves that stopped fitting. People brave enough to say, out loud, I was wrong about that. Fathers who are trying — badly, but trying. Mothers learning how to forgive themselves. Men who aren’t scared of being tender. Women with dirt under their fingernails. Strangers who turn into something like family over one breakfast.

I like things that don’t perform.

Coffee gone cold because the conversation got better than the coffee. An empty road and a full tank. The smell right after it rains. Campfires. Airports at weird hours. That blue hour right before the light goes. Jazz that sounds like it’s missing somebody. Long silences that don’t need rescuing. The first laugh somebody lets out after they’ve been crying.

Somewhere along the way I stopped collecting polished people.

I trust the ones who’ve survived something. And not because I think scars are pretty — I don’t want to romanticize the getting-cut part. It’s more that a scar is proof. Proof that whatever it was, it didn’t win. That there was beauty in there, and it made it through.

Maybe that’s why I’m such a sucker for a second act.

A second act is proof that a life can fall apart without the whole thing turning into a tragedy. That an ending can turn out to be an introduction. That losing your way is, sometimes, the only route there is to actually meeting yourself.

I’ve had a couple of these now. The kind where everything you were sure you needed gets taken, or burns, or just ends — and then some version of you you’d never met before walks out of the rubble. I didn’t like the process. I wouldn’t sign up for it again. But I can’t pretend it didn’t hand me a face I actually recognize.

So no. I don’t think beauty lives in perfection. I think it lives in whatever’s still standing after the fire.

The version of you that only shows up once you’ve lost the stuff you swore you couldn’t live without. The one that’s a little scuffed and a lot more honest. That’s the beauty I keep looking for. In people. In places. In the strays I meet who’ve clearly been through it.

And here’s the part I didn’t expect. Every time I find it out there — the chipped, the mended, the survived — I end up finding a little more of it in myself too.

Like it recognizes its own.

John