Inside Out

Sometimes I wish we could turn people inside out. We walk around this world with so much baggage, so much history, tightly wrapped around ourselves that it is difficult to tell who we really are. I want to turn people inside out, so I can get to the tenderness inside them. I want to know people without the shell. You know how when you get fruit salad at an expensive restaurant, they take the membranes off the orange sections. The oranges are a little bit floppier, and they fall apart easily, but you get right to the sweetness of them without having to gag and chew your way through the tough outer part. People should be like oranges in high-society fruit salad. I am tired of gagging and chewing my way through people’s membranes. I want my soul to be able to access your soul without all of the dancing around and digging through years of baggage. Sometimes I feel like I spend most of my time rummaging through the past to get to the present. It’s like spending your entire day going through the things in your grandmother’s attic, only to find, way back in the corner the comic book you bought that morning. It isn’t that I don’t think history is important. I do. I just want to be able to see the person first, and learn their history later. Our knowledge of history taints our view of the world, and I am sure that it has cost each of us more than one friend, whose history or baggage was just too thick to chew through. Today, I hope I can treasure the comic book I bought this morning even though I had to dig through years of crap to find it. I want to get at the heart of people in a real way, and I want them to be able to get at mine. I am not sure this makes sense, but I have been thinking a bit lately about how we camouflage ourselves with junk that we pull around ourselves like hard shells and keep the good stuff, the tender stuff, hidden.