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• The Anatomy of A Broken Heart

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Glass Child

I was born a normal child.I remember the milk bottle, the voices around me that rock me to sleep.The voices were soft, sometimes a little loud but it was pleasant, comfortable.I was a child, I did not understand a lot of things. My mother would always be sad, and then I am sad.I was flesh and blood, so did my mother.It was then I started hearing the sounds.The cracking sounds were soft and can only be heard in the corner of the house. Every time my mother walked by I would hear it, like shards of glass that got crushed under every foot step.And it becomes louder. The glass shards around the house became bigger, we can no longer move around without avoiding it. Our feet would bleed every time we stepped on the glass but it cannot be avoided, there are too many and too sharp.Is it strange that I find comfort in tip toeing around the house? Carefully avoiding the glass on the floor and listening to the slight clinging sounds when the shards of glass hitting each other as I move through them.The shards of glass grew bigger and bigger over time as their number multiplied over the years. The sounds from the glass shards has grown louder over time, it took me a while to realise that my mother was purposely throwing them on the ground, on the floor, towards the ceiling, everywhere else in the house. She was doing it herself, the shards of glasses no longer break on their own anymore.As time went by, my mother started paying more attention to the shards of glass around the house more than she saw me. I know that the glass was a hassle. Should I do something? And then I started noticing the shadow people.The shadow people would always pick up the shards of glass when my mother wasn’t looking. Little by little, so it wouldn’t drown the house. I can’t see them but I knew that I had to also pick up the glass shards.The shadow people would always bring the shards to the room at the back of the house. I can’t talk to the shadow people, I don’t know what is in there.When I had collected enough glass shards, I tried to bring them to the back of the house but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get in. The shadow people looked at me and carried on with their work.I took my basket full of shards to my mother.She might be mad but no one in the house could talk to me besides my mother, I can only ask her what to do.My mother took a glance at my basket and walked away. Just like the shadow people.The shadow people looked at me.My mother looked at the glass shards in my hands.They both said nothing.With my basket full of glass shards, I started building castles. Surely my mother will feel better if she saw the glass in a beautiful way. I thought hopefully. Piece by piece, I started building glass castles. One after another.My hands would bleed every time I build castles with the glass shards I collected. And my mother would always talk to me about the castles after that. Soon it had become a routine, my mother would only be able to see me when I made a castle full of glass shards.The shadow people would be by our side, quietly collecting the remaining glass shards and bringing it to the dark room at the back of the house.My hands no longer hurt when I built glass castles and over time, my mother stopped seeing me when I built them too.No matter how hard I tried, she can no longer see me.To my surprise, the shadow people spoke to me for the first time ever.The glass went into you.I don’t understand what they meant. I tried to ask them why but it doesn’t seem like the shadow people can hear me either, just like my mother.My mother would still throw the glass shards onto the wall around the house and when it broke it scatters around. It had become a routine for us to pick up the shards. I no longer build them for my mother, the castles stay in my room.One day, my hand got stuck in the castle that I was building. I panicked and forcibly pulled it out but a sharp clinging sound suddenly echoed in the room when my finger broke free from the glass castle.My finger broke. It wasn’t flesh and blood but glass. The tip of my finger got absorbed into the glass castle and eventually fused into it. The remaining of my finger was crystallised into a full finger again, an entire finger made of glass.Is that what the shadow people were trying to tell me? That I have become glass without realising? That I am no different than the glass shards that kept appearing in the house. That I can also without warning be picked up by my mother one day and threw against the wall?Thoughts plague my mind but I kept building castles.I have become glass, light goes through me and my hands no longer bleed, my mother stopped seeing me, stopped talking to me. For I have become glass just like everything else beside her.Perhaps the shadow people were once glass people, once thoroughly broken what’s left is just a shadow of their existence.I never know why the glass started appearing in the house in the first place and why I am my mother’s child. I doubt this is a question I will ever have an answer. Glass is beautiful yet fragile. Beautiful yet invisible.There are times I wonder what is in the dark room at the back of the house.It’s a place only adults know.The shadow people said. Decades have passed yet I still can’t get in.Adult.I have become glass, yet still a glass child.

-END-

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