Stumbles

It's funny, how hard we try to be okay, strong, happy; just a few more broken ends to glue together, another broken personality to be dealt with, another broken day to face, more broken things to fix. Even when we're not dealing so well--when it's taking longer to wake up, to get on top of things, to be inspired for everyone--we still think we're dealing well enough, holding on and being strong like we're supposed to be. No one will ever get a single whimper out of you until it's gone beyond a little emotional softness into a hard sort of cynicism, and then everyone has a laugh at your little surprises.
And then there is the one person who is unlucky/lucky enough to stumble upon the foxhole that is your emotional fragility. The one who happens to stumble outside when you are behind the shed having your first cry in years, or the one who happened to have been there when someone was breaking your heart, and who happened to have been there again when everyone who came after that was giving you a hard time. Whoever they are, or whoever you are in relation to them, they lend you themselves and they hold you. When they're there and you didn't expect them to be, it's almost as though they put a period at the end of the sentence; they wrapped things up; they put a lid on the garbage can. They become the most important person in the world to you by sheer chance. They saw you cry, they saw the mess that you can be--they came out and looked for you. They said "I never knew..." and you know they never would have unless they had taken the one-in-a-million left turn or late night bathroom run.
And the funny thing is, while everyone believes they can be strong and hold up for everyone else, sometimes we need to break down to give someone else an opportunity to be strong. And if we were perfectly honest, while we may think we'd be happiest if we could hold up and fight the dignified fight to the very last, we're always the happiest when someone stumbles onto us and finds out that we're a lot less than they always thought we were.