It is a particular sort of pain to feel the illusions of grandeur and beauty you hold someone within crumble and fall away.

The sense one gets is not quite contempt or disappointment, but close enough to it that we go from looking up towards them to wondering why they have dipped below level, then realizing that for us to still be with them we would have to nudge the control stick forwards until our sightline is slanted just the tiniest bit downwards.

And it is disorienting at best, for a while. Should we not be climbing ever upwards? Does this mean we need to distance ourselves, set our lives apart from the rabble even more, maintain our own saintliness though it costs us yet another relationship, experience, or pastime?

Like the Little Prince who struggles to understand that his one beautiful rose is not perfect, we want “our people” to be certain ways in our minds — until we realize each of them are really just one flower out of nine thousand million others and that they are not special because they are angels, but because they are the “flowers” we get to care for and understand.

‘Tis a strange sort of beauty, then, to love something common and have it become precious and uncommon to us not through fancies dreamt up about them, but through our gentle witnessing and experiencing of what they are — and choosing to be with them in it all.