Life

is like walking around in a pale swirling mist.

Inside your stomach is a partially-completed puzzle. All different pieces float by lightly on the breeze, gently bumping into you. Though you cannot see them, you can feel them where they make contact with your body, and you try to grab at them as they go by. Suddenly one is in your hand and it is somehow strangely familiar. You hold it up and can make out a vague outline in the haze. You trace the shape with your fingertips. It feels like it would fit one of the gaps. You move your hand towards your stomach, blindly groping to see if it fits as the whiteness drifts around your eyes. You rotate it and move it around, feeling your way with your other hand. And then it clicks into place. A part of you that you knew at the dawn of time has been returned to where it belongs, and your entire body, mind, and soul rejoices!

And you continue along. Looking for those other missing pieces. Sometimes you hunt for one specifically. Other times you just grab at whatever seems useful and just try it out.

Some days you stumble upon one that fits perfectly and you swear you already found that piece last year. You actually remember placing it in there, right next to your small intestine. That is another secret to life: learning to keep track of your pieces, developing strong abdominal muscles to hold them in place.

One day you find a piece that you know won't fit into any of your spaces and you go to discard it back into the wind when you see a friend of yours through the fog. You walk over without knowing why and offer the piece to them not realizing that this is the exact one they had been looking for for months, years even. And they say "how can I ever repay you?" You try to explain that it's just something you had on hand and weren't using.

Yes that is life. And so we go filling in the blank spaces in our stomach puzzles with pieces that float by on the breeze.