I was driving back from the doctor today, feeling soft and tender, Iron and Wine filling the car as I processed the weight of a friendship that’s been… complicated lately. We had a rupture, and I find myself caught between looking for all the ways they hurt me and moments of softening, where I see my own part in it. Part of me wants to repair it, part of me feels ready to walk away. It all feels so strained now when we’re together.
That’s when I noticed the fly. At first, anxiety fluttered in my chest—there’s something unsettling about a moving insect when you’re driving and can’t exactly defend yourself. But this wasn’t your typical zippy fly. This one moved slowly, sluggishly, like it had been trapped in my car for who knows how long. I cracked open my window, hoping it would fly toward freedom. Instead, it walked further away from the opening, further from what could save it. How long had it been stuck? Could it even feel the fresh breeze on its wings? Why wouldn’t it go toward what could help?
And then I wondered: Am I that fly? In this friendship, am I walking away from the very thing that could free me? Or is staying and trying to fix what feels broken actually the trap? When do you know whether to fight for something or let it go? But maybe I was asking the wrong question. Maybe it’s not about choosing all the way in or all the way out.
Just then, my partner texted that he was leaving for work. I told him I was almost to the high school—we’d probably pass each other. And we did, right at S Olive Road. Right at S Olive Road. The place where the shooting happened. The spot I still can’t drive by without tears catching in my throat. But, in that moment, his hand shot out his window, waving wildly, and mine followed without thinking. My whole arm was flailing about, my body leaning toward the window, reaching across the space between our cars. I pulled my hand back in, grinning ear-to-ear, something bright and childlike flooding my chest.
A cracked window moment. Right there. In the exact place that usually holds so much heaviness.
And suddenly I understood something: We don’t have to choose between all joy or all sorrow, all in or all out, all fixed or all broken. We can hold the complexity. We can wave wildly in the places that make us cry. We can love imperfectly and still find moments that make our hearts overflow.
With my husband, love gets to be easy—uncomplicated, secure. With my friend, I’m exhausting myself trying to navigate every interaction. But maybe that’s okay too. Maybe both can exist. Maybe the cracked window isn’t always about walking toward the obvious opening or away from it. Maybe it’s about noticing the light that’s already there, even in the complicated spaces.
There’s a poem by Stuart Kestenbaum that keeps running through my mind: “Gather up whatever is glittering in the gutter, whatever has tumbled in the waves or fallen in flames out of the sky, for it’s not only our hearts that are broken, but the heart of the world as well. Stitch it back together… See how everything we have made gathers the light inside itself and overflows? A blessing.”
That’s what the waving was—gathering up what was glittering. Creating a new memory in a space that holds trauma. Stitching together joy and grief, simple love and complicated friendship, the weight of loss and the lightness of connection.
Whatever you’re carrying over from the holidays, whatever relationships feel impossible to navigate—you don’t have to fix it all or abandon it all. You can stay right where you are in the messy middle and still catch the light.
Those cracked window moments are everywhere. In the hard places. In the tender spaces. In the ordinary Tuesday when someone you love waves at you like you’re the best thing they’ve ever seen.
Name them. Let them in. Let them remind you that even broken hearts can overflow with blessing.
“ …am I walking away from the very thing that could free me?”
