When I was seven, my mom would tell me my heart was a puzzle.

She would say, “Everything in your heart, everything you love, cherish, despise, fear, yearn for, all of it fits together perfectly, just like a puzzle.” I would stare up at the ceiling at night, trying to flip over the pieces that were upside down. Find the corners. Try to grasp the amount of pieces there were. Anything.

I grew older, the weight on my shoulders heavier, my smile dimmer. I looked in the mirror and a version of me I did not know stared back. The puzzle in my heart was still nowhere to be found.

Sometimes when I slept, I unintentionally dreamt of running away. Packing my bags at two in the morning and going some place I’ve never heard of before. Getting high off the London streetlights, getting drunk on the bottled poetry of Paris.

Life goes on. Glasses are shattered and vows are spoken. Promises are made and then forgotten, just like everything else in this beautiful tortured world.

My heart begins to accumulate. Tucked away into the far right corner is what I wish I could have said. A piece is sectioned off for the things in life that make it worth living. A fragment for the future, a segment for the secrets. There’s the love letter I never sent, the images on the ‘favorites’ album on my phone, the love I have for the places I have never even seen. The soiled fortune from a fortune cookie in my pocket. The happy birthday cards I sent and the ones I received. The pattern on my grandmother’s favorite bedsheet. The thorns and the roses. The tattered post-it notes. Every empty can of soda. All these things have been packed to the brim of my heart, spilling over the edges, an overwhelming amount of sincerity and passion and love.

For the first time in my life, I realized why this puzzle was nowhere to be found, and it was simply because it did not exist. Looking at my heart, I never saw a puzzle, never saw something that needed to be solved. Instead I saw this nonsensical and fractured mosaic. It was something to trust, to leave be. And if you looked at it from the perfect angle in the perfect lighting, it might even have the potential to become something extraordinary.