stained glass soul

to be shaped by others, and still be whole

I am blessed with the curse of attachment. Not the type where you can’t walk away, destructing everyone in the process; not the type where you keep going back, weak and hopeful. This kind runs quieter. I remember people the way others remember songs. I carry them in clothes, in habits, in phrases I never used until they did. My world is painted with the favorite colours of everyone I’ve ever loved: I flinch at lavender, smile at forest green. I cannot walk through a season, smell cologne, or hear a certain laugh without thinking, there you are again.

There’s a word, retrouvaille, that names the joy of reuniting after a long separation. It doesn't specify the form of reunion-- it could be the awkward familiarity of an old inside joke slipping into a new conversation, the taste of a dish you didn’t realize you’d memorized, or a street you haven’t walked in years suddenly feeling like home. It’s not always about finding someone again in the flesh. Sometimes, it’s the rediscovery of what they left behind in you. You see it not in how loudly you love, but instead how you carry the ones you’ve said goodbye to.

It’s not always talked about-- we didn’t choose this. It just happens. A kind of unconscious preservation. A form of remembrance through palette, through scent, through sound.

“To live in hearts we leave behind,

Is not to die.”

- Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by stained glass. I went to a Catholic elementary school, uninterested in everything but counting down the days until Mass-- when we’d have to go to the church. I’d then sit there for hours, tuning out all the scripture, staring instead at the way the coloured panes glowed in the sun.

I grew up dreaming, hoping,

I wish looking at my soul was like looking through stained glass.

I then grew up some more, and that turned into,

I wish you could hold my soul up to the light.

You’d then see my collage of others, whole in its brokenness, and understand why I glow.

To know me, to know someone like this, is to witness a living mosaic. We are not whole in the way stone is whole-- we are whole in the way stained glass is whole: fractured, lit from within. Sometimes it’s called being “too sensitive,” or “too attached,” or “not knowing how to let go.” But I think what we’re doing is remembering. I think what we’re doing is living.

I used to think I had to keep everyone alive in me, perfectly preserved. Now I know it’s enough that they left something behind. A color. A gesture. A glint of light. I don’t have to hold on tightly. I just have to allow the sun to shine on me.

There’s a strip of pink and purple placed side by side-- the same colours as my first boyfriend’s school jersey. We were fourteen. I didn’t know where to place my hands, how to let my arms fall naturally. So instead, I held onto my necklace all throughout our first date. When we said goodbye, he mentioned my nervous tic, and from then on, he never let my hand go unheld. We lasted two weeks. Yet to this day, I still reach for the jewelry around my neck when I need comfort.

There’s a much larger, breathtaking picture, possibly in the shape of a bunny, with a mix of baby pink, dark red, black, grey, and white. This one is my best friend. She’s the reason I reach for strawberry-scented anything, the reason I no longer skip over pink clothes in stores. I keep eyelash glue on my vanity even though I only use mascara, I have hundreds of playlists for her hundred different moods. She has altered my brain chemistry-- she’s inserted herself in everything I do, everywhere I go, and I gladly let her. I would, and will, do anything for her. She is the reason I am who I am. She’s not just a part of the picture-- she shaped the light that shines through it.

The foundation, the colour that fills every empty space, seemingly framing my entire soul, is my mother. She is blue. She shines the brightest in moonlight, and becomes my shadow in sunlight. I carry her in everything I feel, everything I do. I am a reflection of her own stained glass soul, which I imagine is filled with many more years of love that I’ve yet to live, and many more lessons I’ve yet to learn.

There are smaller, just as important, pieces. You’ll see them in the music I still can’t skip, in the way I remember birthdays for people who haven’t spoken to me in years, in how my laugh shifts depending on who I’m with, because I once loved someone who laughed just like that. I am not pretending to be anyone else-- I’m simply remembering how to love in all the ways I was once loved.

There are also colors I wish I could forget. The ones that hide, blend in, more than shine. I’ve tried scraping them off the glass, pretending they were never part of the design-- but they always return when the light hits just right. Not every reunion is bright.

This is the quiet adversity the miracle of retrouvaille holds. Not just the joy of seeing someone again after a long time, but the rediscovery of how they live on inside you, even when they’re gone. Every time we remember, every time we love someone new, every time we smile at a color and don’t know why, we are reuniting, endlessly, with all the people who made us who we are.

I have a stained glass soul. This is me.

Not just shaped by love, but filled by it-- bit by bit, person by person, until I no longer know where someone else ends and I begin. I hold on, not because I haven’t healed, but because some people aren’t meant to be let go of entirely.

They are not haunting. They are gathered.

And every time I love again, I am not starting over.

I am continuing. Collecting.

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Thank you for reading,

Nico

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