The Glass Wall
Somewhere, on the edge of the happy part of my mind, there is a glass wall.
On one side of the wall, all things are well. The sun is out. The grass is green, glistening with a homely dew. A diaphanous wind holds my cheek in fluttering fingers. And all things are well.
On the other, all things are dark. This is where everything that has broken me is kept. The moon is out, but she is alone. It is always night. Things long buried stalk the darkness like it is their prey. Half-formed images threaten to coalesce from smoke and become vivid. And all things are dark.
For the most part, the glass wall keeps the peace. The nice side of the wall is my side of the wall. It is where I live. I am happy there.
The problem with the glass wall, however, is that it is made of glass. And glass, very much like a person, is liable to break. It doesn’t break often, which I count among my many blessings. But it does break.
It does break, and the edges of the pieces it leaves are sharp.
When it breaks, the things that live in the dark place are free to emerge. They crawl through the holes in the wall, dragging themselves across the ground like snakes, like twisted demons from the depths of a Lovecraftian mind. They come to raze.
And the half-formed images coalesce from smoke:
The way she looked in the rain.
A man’s body, far too young to fail.
Six months of his childhood that slipped through my fingers.
A half-caught glimpse of her across the room.
A million, million mistakes.
A child without breath.
The knowledge that I knelt down to pick up the broken pieces of a person and stepped on them instead.
After a while I always find the sharp edges of the hole in the wall and fix it, banishing these images back to the dark side of my mind. But I never fail to cut myself. I can hardly count the scars from the ragged edges of glass that I’ve picked up and put back. They drag across my skin like thorns. This is the price we all pay.
Every time our walls break, they leave us scarred.
But we always put them back together.
Always.
