"Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen - these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."
- an excerpt from [Paper Towns] by John Green, a book that I read recently,When I came across this part, it hits me like, maybe the moment when Archimedes shouted "Eureka!" when he determined the purity of gold, or when I cursed in Greek for realizing I haven't paid the monthly bill and it is waaay past the allocated time.
I clearly don't know how to describe how I am very much agree with this thought, but then, I remembered about a Japanese proverb which goes like this, "Everyone carries two faces in their whole life, one for showing it to other people, and one is for themselves."
And I was like, the saying about 'two face person' actually applies to everyone.
Being out and about, meeting people in parties or posting pictures in social media, doesn't always shows the true form of you. You dress up well, all those out-of-date attires goes to welfare or end up as trash; poses in front of the camera, the once you like goes public, the ones you hate ends up deleted. If life is Facebook then whatever you show people is for the sake of receiving 'likes' from them. Even better if the amount of people who have 'seen' your status is directly proportional to the amount of 'likes' that you get.
Then being at home all alone, in your worn out t-shirt and weeks of unwashed pants, eating lasagna out of the fridge without bother heating it, hair undone, without caring anything about how indecent you are right now, sits in front of your laptop absorbing yourself in those social sites. Scrolling.. Judging.. Scrolling..
You appeared to people in how they wanted to see you. Not how you wanted them to know you.
But then again, if you were asked, how well did you know yourself? The correct way to answer this question is by asking your close friends what did they think about yourself. Because you don't realized how do you act
Fun fact: One person who will never see you in person is yourself. The mirror is just a reflecting tool and you just see an image of yourself, not the real you.
Somehow, using I is no longer justifiable. i seems more reasonable.
So when one of those time comes, the unwanted moment i.e tragedy or disaster, one will surely breaks down, and that is the time we know about their true colors. Like the watertight vessel metaphor, once it starts to crack the ends become inevitable. And when you also suffers a crack, then everything comes in and out simultaneously, like an exchange of water or air, balancing each other to stay afloat. You me and i you. We started to share stories, information, mostly honesty rather than fibbing. We see each other in our best and worst days and that is when we see face-to-face.
That is when we don't care about the world anymore. It is just us against the world.
