second year carlie gambino

Beautiful days exist around your life. Yet, your day is mundane. The alarm clock loudly sounds to remind you it’s morning. On the bus, you catch up on news. You don’t realize you missed your stop until someone bumps into you. In class, you stress over papers to write and materials to study. Once class is over, you barely make the bus by squeezing into the overstuffed suitcase interior. Your mind is too preoccupied for waving to friends. At home, you pull out your computer and continue working so later you have more time for Twitter and Netflix.

Pieces of levitating dust in the sunlight glimmer like moonlight atop waves. They settle on your face until you wake abruptly the next day, phone in hand. The phone topples from your grasp, and the screen shatters as it hits the edge of the nightstand. It’s unreadable. Suddenly, everything is still, as if it is your day that has shattered irreparably.

Everywhere you look today something is new. The song of Athens plays while waiting for the bus. Much too loud engines are the bass, chattering birds the melody, and shifting shrubs the harmony. Out the window of the bus you see the same red brick buildings, which haven’t changed since orientation all those years ago. A bench casts a shadow resembling a barcode. At your stop, the brilliant sky strikes you blind. When your eyes adjust, you notice the dust bunny clouds tumbling through the sky. You walk through a clump of feathery flowers as light and stringy as baby hairs. You greet your friends enthusiastically. You can’t help but smile. You stroll home, yet the breeze holds your outstretched hand, begging you to stay outside.

You had time for remembering to breathe. You listened and saw. There was more than hearing and sight. The details you notice are like pieces of a shattered screen. By themselves, they seem unimportant and unassumingly small, but when put together, they form a complete mosaic.

Too many people get caught in an internal struggle, so they fail to notice the minutiae of a day. A slouched, inward texting posture displays our narrow focus, demonstrating how phones may connect us to ourselves and not to each other. You cannot forget to look up. See and take part in the surrounding beauty of other lives. When something shatters, find molds for the pieces; you can make a mosaic. The world’s pieces are designed to fit together -just like how the first words of each paragraph in this article form a message. Beautiful pieces are everywhere. If you ever feel full of broken pieces, just remember you too are beautiful pieces. You are a mosaic.

Everything Is Waiting