All of me

If you ask me what I'm learning in college I just realized I can tell you in a single line:
to live with contradictions (both yours and mine).

I can sniff them out like a dog at an airport now -
in literature class when the dust starts to settle

just shake it up.
There's no black and white.
No right and wrong.
Every duality has a hundred hidden shades
behind the image of itself -

and I

I understand
I'll get an A in the damn essay
but my god

what if it all ends and the books are put back in the shelf
and I still don't know how to live my life
because I'm learning -

I'm learning damn well how to live with your contradictions,
I can forgive, I can see the hundred masks behind a single face,
and I tell myself I'll be okay, be okay,

but what if I can't forgive the contradictions in myself?
What if I know I shouldn't and yet I must
box everything in neat categories
and weep about what doesn't fit?

What if I don't understand why I don't fall in love -
or I do, a hundred times, hold it to my chest as if I'm drowning,
and then let it go - to the wind - like a hundred hidden birds -

as if I swallowed all the water and painted a face on the newborn sun
and everything is blossom and bud, freedom and forgetfulness,
there's no need for a lifeboat, there's no need for you

just me
all of me - but -

can you forgive me for that?
Can I?