Hearts of Glass

If you close your eyes you can see it the way it used to be. The way it was once, back when we were children. 

I carry around your memory, like a map in an unknown city. Like the cigarettes I promise myself, year after year, to give up. Like the smell of the sea, it's a memory that lives with you, dwelling in the recesses of the olfactory, waiting for the moment of remembrance, bringing with it waves of nostalgia.

I wanted to promise you the world that day. It smelt for the first time of spring, the air rich with light. We lay on the fresh morning grass and searched the horizon for clouds. 

There was so much that I wanted to promise you, but even then, my glass heart relented, and I said nothing. For fear that I was offering more than you would ask of me, for fear that the earth, the sun, the sky, already had stolen your heart and you would have no more room for me.

You told me, years later, that you had waited for me to speak, thinking that your own lips were made of glass, and to talk would cause you to shatter into delicate shards and pieces in front of me. I shared with you the same fear I held, and we laughed bitterly at our loss. 

For somewhere along the lines, we had been taught that though we are not made of glass, we still may shatter. 

And thus, we became stone, deeper and stronger, colder and more distant, hiding beneath a thin layer of skin, of warmth and humanity.