Pygmalion, on my mind

Recent events in my friends' lives (and, for the longest time, mine) have made me start thinking of Pygmalion: he of the famed myth, he who inspired Bernard Shaw's play, he who made the creation and popularity of "My Fair Lady" possible, he who found love in a stone-filled place.

We are all Pygmalions, in one way, or another, at some point in our lives, or another, at certain hours and days of the week, the year, or others, with certain variations to the story.

We sculpt ideals in our minds, often make resolute plans to redo, and undo, and end up with feeble attempts at justifying these sketches' likeness (or lack, thereof) to the blueprint we had so painstakingly labored at, in the beginning.

We sculpted and stared, tried to breathe life into our work, only to find out, way before the end, that our fantasy of a being, could never be what we dreamed for them to become. Our expectations slip away from their fingertips like invisible dust; their eyes, their stare, seldom end up frozen exactly where we intended for them to. Our recourse is to alter, to rearrange, to cut--until all we're left with are scraps, shards, pieces. We cut ourselves as we fumble, to look for what is no longer there, to reassess our thoughts and actions, to rebuild the dreams of wholeness, both ours and the beloved's.

Even the flowers from our mouths are illusions. We have to begin with, and love, what's already there, to begin with.