People have asked me many times before why I love Baltimore so much. My answer has always been the same: because it’s broken.
I think this is a difficult thing for many people to understand, why I would feel the way I feel. We are, after all, a society that admires, perhaps above all else, “winners,” and encourages people to relentlessly pursue betterment and achievement — the end goal of our pursuits being some lofty perfection we can’t even completely conceive of, let alone achieve. But we try and keep on trying, always looking up to those deemed brightest and best, to individuals who exude confidence and present a face of at least surface-level flawlessness. We appreciate and admire the illusion, if nothing else.
But I’ve always been someone who was rubbed the wrong way by the champions, irritated by the conquering heroes, visibly annoyed by the class presidents, valedictorians, and most likely to succeed-ers of the world. My people have always been the outcasts and least-likely-to underdogs, the burnouts huddled together behind the bleachers, the dismissed and unpopular weirdos and nerds. And so, regardless of whatever successes I’ve had in my life, I’ve never been able to shake feeling like someone who doesn’t quite belong or fit in, a person whose triumphs somehow always seem like anomalous flukes, and who, if it came down to it, would still be picked last for the team.
This is why I hate the New York Yankees, incidentally.
Point being, I strongly identify with people and things that are flawed, cast-out, wounded, and Baltimore is a place that is, in a way, perfect in its imperfection. It is beautiful to me, that brokenness. To my mind, it is virtually impossible to love perfection — at least for me it is. What makes things and people lovable, what makes them resonate and what elicits a depth of empathetic feeling, are their flaws and wounds and weaknesses. The profound sadness each and every person carries tucked under their arm everyday, even as they present a gleaming, bleached-white, aspiring-to-perfection smile to the world. That is humanity I can love.
. . . . .
On Thanksgiving J came over and we spent the day together, cooking with M.
It was strangely normal. At moments it felt downright good. Right. Surprisingly, I only cried once, when I clumsily shattered one of two beautiful hand-etched art glasses J bought me ages ago for an occasion which now escapes me. It seemed imbued with a sad sort of symbolism. When I broke down, J hugged me and said, “It’s just a glass.” But then he knows how I am. I can’t stop seeing the layers in things, feeling around for meaning, significance — whether it’s there or not.
Anyway, I guess the thing I really want to say here is that everything is still, and I imagine for a long time will continue to be, complicated, but that complexity is beautiful. J and I struggle, individually and together, but that struggle is honest and real and truthful. And though it is indeed painful at times and more than a little rough around the edges, for all its brokenness I think I love our family more now than I did before J and I split, odd as that may sound. I think this is because we’ve stopped trying to be something we aren’t. We are now fully and honestly ourselves, unmasked and unvarnished: flawed people, who make mistakes, but who love one another and do everything possible to be good to each other, to take care of each other. We stopped trying to be perfect, trying to conform to someone else’s idea of what a family should be that didn’t fit the reality of who and what we are.
Sometimes it turns out that what you thought you wanted really wasn’t the right thing for you, however much you hoped it would be. Sometimes facing the hardest, most painful truths is the only possible path to happiness. Sometimes finding real peace and contentment means breaking with — not maintaining — the status quo.
And sometimes imperfection is absolutely and undeniably perfect.
