When everything falls appart.

There are moments in life when anguish and sadness rise to the surface and completely overwhelm us. When everything falls apart.

To be honest, I’d like to know the exact moment when everything turns into nothing — when everything disappears, everything breaks, and you have to start picking up the pieces scattered everywhere, where little bits of your soul got stuck.

I have some ideas about what those moments might be. Most of the time, the more you plan something, the less the outcome aligns with the plan. Murphy’s Law says that if something can go wrong, it will. But there are many laws, and not all of them have to be right, right? I think about this a lot. But that’s not reality. Reality is looking at your dreams and ideals with a realistic perspective. Reality is that sometimes, we can’t have it all — not right away, not without failing first.

When I reflect on this, I sometimes feel like mediocrity takes over me because I can’t reach my goals, and that constant feeling of failure is what spreads the pain. Not everything is as you imagine, and it never will be — because that’s part of life.

When you fully trust that something will go well and it doesn’t, you break. When you trust someone and they betray you, you break. When you expect something beautiful and it turns out to be nothing but darkness, you break. That’s how, little by little, you start scattering pieces of your soul throughout your inner self. This ongoing pain inevitably causes everything to shatter and collapse around you. Despair takes over, and you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to see the world the way you used to before everything tore you apart, and you don’t know how to put yourself back together.

I can say, even knowing how much I still have left to see, that after everything I’ve lived and felt, I’ve come to the conclusion that, no matter how necessary it may be for everything to fall to pieces sometimes, the emptiness left behind by everything breaking is the source of a deep sadness. Sometimes it fades, it’s true — maybe just like that, or maybe after a long and difficult internal struggle.

But other times, it doesn’t. We can see sad souls wandering the streets — you only need to look at their gaze, at their eyes.

“The eyes chico, they never lie.”

I wish I had the key to make sadness disappear, but as I said before, not everything is possible. I believe that this anguish only goes away when you look deep within yourself, start from scratch, pick up the pieces, and put them together to form a puzzle.

A puzzle that may not be the same one you started with, but it will be just as beautiful and perfect. Not all puzzles are the same — they don’t have the same landscapes, nor the same pieces — but in the end, the pieces fit together perfectly, as if everything had made sense all along, and the landscapes and images seem to align once again, making you shine like you used to.