Interconnected like the stitches in your favorite blanket from when you were young lie the people in your life. Woven into the depths of your mind, there are some people who are a bright red thread —stunning, defining, recurring, glaring so bright you may never forget them. They are the ones who you truly remember, their names coating your voice with reminiscence as you tell your children the stories of pain, heartbreak and joy. The others are more faint, the background noise and the beige in your mind. However, on the tip of your tongue their name echos, painted with the nostalgia of empty "hello's" in the halls. Each purposefully put in place, each unraveling a part of you, each playing a part in discovering a picture within the tapestry of your memories.

Everyone, every last person you ever spoke one word to has a role in shaping you. That is the carefully built fabric of your life, a constantly shifting as you continue to add more people, more threads and more substance to your story. Your story is made up of everyone around you even those that don't seem to make a difference.

I think it's beautiful — how much we don't know about ourselves and how much other people have inadvertently affected us. It makes us realize the value of "meaningless" encounters. Hello's that may have never been said if it wasn't for the chance that a slight breeze blew the paper from your hand. Friendships may have never been sparked if you hadn't made eye contact with that one specific person. Every defining moment in your life has a chain of milliseconds of events leading up to it, where even one out of place could have changed everything forever. Is it fate or is it just us? I don't know but in our memories, we never remember the blur before the complete picture.

We all have people we regret ever meeting. But should we regret them? Should they be the stains on on the fabric of our making, or are they actually careful mistakes planned to make you realize the error in your own ways? Thread by thread you count the wrongs done upon you by the so call memories of the people you once hated, loved, cherished of desired. You dwell on the past like it will change the future.

But the fabric does not change for anyone. Feel freely, and learn passionately as you continue to grow.