We walk through the world trying to find avenues to sum everything up. But the truth is that everyone we pass lives wildly complicated lives. The brevity of their passage along ours colors the moment with a mere glimpse at the complex congeries that ail and inspire them. There is no one that you’ve met who was static. Dismiss them as you may, every person you’ve ever deemed simple has held the same length of day and felt the same drag of time. 

They’re dimly hued with the same basic hopes for love and comfort that blanket us all in an equalizing tinge. They’re marked by the fools they’ve suffered and the wicked hearts that’ve scorched them. They’re watercolored by the sadness that clouded everything else with a suffocating, oppressive balm. They’re highlighted by the threads of joy they’ve found and followed through life. They’re balanced by the contrast of warm, bright light that love has brought and the blues that seem bottomless that heartbreak packed. 

They’re a canvas that arrived like you, a pale green into a world too ready to defile it. They’ve acquired the same Pollock-like disarray of honorable and rueful splatters. They’ve formed into complicated people. They laugh while they drive by with the windows down. They pass you on the street, their expressions warped into cold lines of distraction. They attempt polite conversation as they go about the routines of their day. And all we know of them are these two-dimensional moments. It’s so easy for us to write one another off. Because we know nothing of how the other loves, of how they speak on what they’re passionate about, about how they ache in moments when they think no one is looking, of how they’re still a pale green canvas under it all looking for meaning and understanding. We don’t see what the other is like around their crush, we don’t know what worlds they conjure when alone in the pleasant safety of their beds, of what they would die for. We meet each other in these uncomplicated moments and we forget that we’re all complicated people.