Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

The Fragmented Glass

Illustrated by Kaya Gonzalez

Remember your salad days. The times when you could frolic freely and innocently, the wild little girl you were. When no one could get mad at you for your little messes or your knotted hair.

Without warning, everything changes. The fire ignites in the kitchen and begins to violently feed off of you. It consumes your clothes, your delicate curls, scalding your skin as it bites into that, too. The shrill piercing sound of your scream shakes the entirety of your reality and causes it to crumble and fall around you, knocking you unconscious, stunned.

Remember the white simplicity of the hospital walls. The pacing doctors wearing their frowns of concentration, the continuous sound of your heartbeat that fills the room.

          Beep.

                               Beep.

                                                    Beep.

                                                                                Beep.

They tend to your burns. They inject nameless cures into your bloodstream, poisoning your blood, wrecking your purity, interfering with nature. They rearrange fragments of you in skin graphs and when you return home you aren’t the same.

The girl you were vanishes, the current of some unknown force pulls her under. You lose yourself that day.

You try to search within yourself, within the sea of yourself, but you can’t find home in the vast unpredictability of you. You are lost, and continue to be lost for years.

Singing songs to yourself, you continue your search.

A boat on the water

Just my sweetie and me

You cling desperately to the mast of your mind as the world around you comes crashing spectacularly to pieces.

Find comfort in the masks, in the personas you become.

The waves too strong,

They swallowed us whole

And my darling girl went down

The rearrangement of your skin heals after the burning, has adapted soundly into its new surroundings. You continue to blister and burn inside yourself, never healing, always searching for something, someone to become.

I reached into the haze for her

But she was gone, long gone

Cover it up by shape shifting into other people. Try to fill the void where the character of yourself once stood with far too much makeup and obnoxious jewellery. You begin to take acting lessons.

My feet blocks of ice

I sat motionless, frozen in place

Call yourself Jenny and dress in sportswear, plaster a smile on your face and wear your hair in a ponytail, call yourself Fiona and sport a faux-fur coat and kitten heels. Develop a detailed knowledge of fine arts.

“Bonjour!” you call to your friends as you haughtily kiss the air surrounding them to which they reply with remarks of sarcasm. Become the girl of many faces, and your peers begin to ridicule you.

I meet her eye

She was scared, scared, scared

As the currents took her from me

And so, you fill the void with the spirit of them. Morph into the collective of your peers and hide there, safe for an instant, but you know that this won't last forever.

I tried to throw the rope

But, my sweet girl

She was long since far gone

You hate your reflection in the mirror. Push it all aside and press on, covering your fears with the cheap drugstore makeup your friends insist you buy. Bury the bad parts of you deep within the vast ocean of your mind. Ignore the comments you overhear surrounding your name, ignore the mocking voice in your own head, the voice that points and laughs and taunts.

“Look at the ugly mess that is you!”

“What an idiot!”

“She dresses like a clown!”

“How stupid she must be, she does not know who she is!”

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

People begin to judge you for your lack of direction, for the messes that have become your life, for the problems that hide themselves within the knots of your hair. Try not to let the flames of their words consume you. Still, they tear at your skin, testing your strength against them.

I tasted the cold, cruel salt of the water

As it sprayed my lips

Retreat further within yourself. You do not know who to be anymore. You try to fight back, but you only end up hurting yourself. Your bygone salad days seem to belong to a different girl in a different life. Growing tired, you have had enough, and so it is that you approach the mirror, facing your fear once and for all.

A kiss goodbye

Look beyond your widened, scared eyes, attempt to find the person beneath the mask of caked-on foundation. With no success, you grow angry and throttle your fist into the glass, desperately reaching within the reflection of the young woman standing within its constraints. In a loud shatter, the fragments of the young woman fall to the floor.

Stare at the mosaic of glass at your feet. You see an altered perception of the young woman you have known your whole life, as if looking at her with fresh eyes.

The glass clinks as you sink down to the tiled floor, blood dripping down the length of your arm. Ignoring it, you take in your surroundings and laugh, the first time you do so with meaning in years. In the fragmentation, you see the young woman you were looking for all these years. She had been inside of you, though you had buried her and doubted her existence.

Touch the mirrored reflection of the young woman, allow yourself finally to take on the role of you. Push yourself from the floor, sweep up the glass, tend to your fresh war wound, and wash the makeup from your face.