All the Beautiful Wreckage

Some people seem genuinely kissed by luck—good-looking, doing work they’re passionate about, faithful partnerships, a circle of friends calibrated for every occasion. And when you actually look behind the surface you find nothing but warmth. No rot. Just someone who loves being alive and isn’t insufferable about it.

I appear to be a magnet for the opposite. Creatures of darkness, people who can’t quite make the pieces of living fit together—depressives, loners, outsiders carrying shredded relationships and bittersweet thoughts of ending it. Voluntarily or by force of circumstance. My friendships, my relationships, the intimacies that blur the line between—they all seem to originate from the shadow side of things.

I take them in and walk the darkest stretches with them. Nights drowned in wine, adventures detached from reality, conversations conducted directly at the heart. And somewhere in that process they find a grip again, some renewed thread of will, and I watch them go back out into the world.

The more destroyed they are, the more clearly I hear something pulsing in them—some excess of passion, some dizzy awareness of what this could be if the angle were slightly different. Outsiders, the rejected, the misunderstood: they have the most interesting things to say. I keep finding that out.