Maybe we were all just as fragile as the sticker we stood behind. This sticker with only three words. But three chosen words could bring us together, couldn’t they? Hadn’t they brought us together so many times? So we wrote three new ones at the moment of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris — Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie). And we marched. We gathered. Together.

Lifted by the scents of the boulangeries, we asked for the same — something new, something fresh. We weren’t just journalists and jokers. Not only French, but humans — humans all over the world. People standing up for the rights to be free, and to be safe in that freedom. Safe to laugh, to create and to grow and to love. So we shuffled from foot to foot, knowing there is never really “safety” in love or creation. Knowing that there’s risk in both. But we lifted signs above our heads and out of our hearts, believing still, the risk was never, is never, meant to be our lives. We had to be secure in the living. Standing next to the ones we loved, and the ones perhaps we’d love to know, we said we were one. We said we were together. We said we were “Charlie.”

I can’t tell you which tragedy happened next. One blurred into the next. And we changed our pictures on Facebook from one flag to another. Vowed our support on Instagram. Shouted our discontent. And changed our banners the following week, and sometimes daily. And it was never enough, and too much for others. So we went back to our smiling selfies, and soon stopped changing our banners altogether.

I don’t want to grow immune to it. To look away at injustice. I don’t want to merely shrug my shoulders and move on. But neither can I, we, carry the weight of it all on our shrugging shoulders. Our weary hearts. Somehow we must keep standing, for and with.

This painting is of that day, that day when we claimed who we were. Standing behind the sticker is Pascal. He is my brother-in-law. Really, he is just my brother. The sticker of “in-law” has long worn off and dropped. Maybe that’s what family is — those who are still there once the stickers have worn off. Once the flags have been changed. And changed again. It is who we really are.

Maybe we need to ask ourselves each day, “Am I a part of this world?”; “Am I a part of the human race?”; “Am I a part of this family?” — look in the mirror, look at those around us, and proudly answer, I am.