I remember his hands the most.
 
You could tell they were the sort of hands that had seen a few things. His veins popped from beneath his fragile, paper-thin skin. His joints were swollen and crooked from years of cleaning floors and fixing roofs, yet soft enough to have held a few babies and probably even more grand babies. I went to bed that night under a single flickering light hanging from the crumbling cathedral ceiling and wrote in my leather-bound notebook, 
 
"I have just met my Egyptian grandfather."

Abraham Lincoln, Oprah, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Michael Jordan, Walt Disney... we all know the list. That inspiring catalog of exceptional human beings who have failed, sometimes repeatedly, but never gave up. People who flourished despite immense hardship. People who emanate the qualities we endlessly try to plant inside ourselves and secretly beseech to grow. 

I hesitate,
watching as you empty a packet of raw sugar
into your black coffee.
Our silence is broken
as your spoon slowly twirls against the glass.
The sugar disintegrates.
You briefly flash me a smile as you grab another packet. 

You think I’m judging you. 

But all I’m thinking about is asking you
this one question.

I write.
I put it out there.
I write.
I put it out there.

Sometimes social media feels like a school auditorium
filled with people on stacked-up boxes,
screaming into megaphones.
Trying to be heard.
To be noticed.
To be whole in a world full of pieces.