Gibran said: Travel and tell no one. Live a true love story and tell no one. Live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.

And I know,
people do ruin beautiful things.
But it is not others.
It is us.
You and I.

For in this world, nothing is perfect.
Yet everything is complete.
And that is what makes each of us perfect.

We ruin beautiful things,
because we are alive.
We touch, we speak, we feel,
and in the touch, we change.
We leave footprints,
not just on the earth,
but on the soul of the moment.
We are not destroyers.
We are translators.

We ruin it by loving it too deeply.
By trying to hold it, to name it,
to make it ours.
We turn a sunset into a photograph,
a song into a story,
a person into a memory.
And in that act, we change it,
sometimes for the better,
sometimes for the worse.

We do not ruin beauty.
We reveal it.
We are the cracks in the vase,
the breath on the mirror,
the hand that holds the flower.
We are the impermanence
that makes the moment sacred.

Because beauty is not a thing
to be preserved.
It is a path to be walked.
And every step, every stumble,
every word spoken in the dark,
is a footprint.
A seed.
A prayer.

All that we feel, think, and say,
Is left behind, and is present.
Present in the people we touched.
In the atmosphere we decorated life with.
Present in us, and in all.

We ruin beautiful things.
But in doing so,
we become the very thing we seek:
Not perfection.
But presence.