The Glass Between Worlds

"Sometimes I think the glass between me and the world isn’t meant to protect me—it’s waiting to break, and I’m the one holding the hammer."

The fluorescent lights weren't really humming. They were whispering. They'd been whispering since I got here three days ago—or was it three years? Time did that here, stretched like taffy, folded like paper. The machines beeped in iambic time. Unstressed-stressed. Unstressed-stressed. Like a heartbeat. Like a poem. Like footsteps in a hallway at night.

I was lying on that bed but I was also floating above it, watching the small woman with the short hair who used to be me. When had I cut it so short? Yesterday? Last month? I couldn't remember wanting to. I just remembered looking in the mirror one morning and seeing someone else's face, someone who might be able to escape if she was thin enough, sharp enough, boy enough.

Noah was there. Sweet Noah with his temple garments under his clothes and his mother's wooden cross around his neck—wearing it to keep peace though his church didn't use crosses. He believed in God's plan. I believed in patterns. The pattern of water droplets sliding down a glass. The pattern of shadows on the ceiling that looked like hands. The pattern of breathing that changed when someone entered a room at night.

The thing inside me turned, and suddenly I was seven.

No—I was twenty-two.

No—I was both. I was all ages at once.

My mother was reading me poetry before bed: "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night." But the words were wrong. She was saying: "Daughter, Daughter, burning bright, Who will come into your room tonight?" That wasn't right. That never happened. My mother read me proper poems about flowers and butterflies, not warnings she didn't know she should give.

Paul was in Noah's arms. My firstborn. Fifteen months old. When I looked at him, sometimes I saw my face. Sometimes I saw Noah's. Sometimes I saw the face of someone I couldn't name but recognised in my bones. He was reaching for me, saying "Mama," and the word split into syllables that rearranged themselves: Ma-ma. Am-am. I am what? I am mother? I am mothered? I am smothered?

The glass of water on the bedside table knew what was coming. I could see it trembling, eager to fulfil its purpose. We understood each other, the glass and I. We both knew about holding things until we broke.

"How are you feeling?" Noah asked, but I heard it in layers. He was asking now. He'd asked yesterday. Someone asked when I was seven, lying very still in bed the morning after, and I'd said "Fine" because what else could I say? The word "fine" was a lie that sounded like breaking. Fi-ne. Fi-nish. Fi-nally.

The baby moved and I wasn't in my body anymore. I was watching from the corner of the ceiling—no, I was in the glass of water—no, I was seven years old in my pink bedroom with the door that didn't lock. The weight inside me was the weight on top of me was the weight of silence was the weight of—

"Heather?" Noah's voice pulled me back. Or pushed me forward. Time was a circle in this room.

I could see what was about to happen. I'd always been able to see endings in beginnings, like reading the last line of a poem first. The glass would break. It had to break. It was already broken in the future and we were just catching up to it.

My hand was moving toward the table and I was watching it happen and I was making it happen and it was happening without me. The back of my hand connected with wood—such a small violence compared to all the others—and the glass took flight.

For a moment, it was beautiful.

The water spread like wings. The glass became light, fracturing into a thousand small suns. Each piece knew where it needed to land. One larger shard, perfect, surgical, poetic, would find its way to the bed beside me. It had been waiting for this moment since sand became glass, since glass became vessel, since vessel became weapon.

But that was later. Now was Paul crying. Now was the sound that made my skull feel like it was splitting—"Mama! Mama!"—each cry a nail hammered into wood. I was the wood. I was being built into something. A cross? A coffin? A crib?

"I can't take it anymore." The words came from somewhere deeper than my throat. They came from the place where seven-year-old me learned to speak without sound, scream without noise. "I want it out. Now."

But I wasn't talking about the baby. Or not just the baby. I was talking about the weight, the memory, the thing that lived under my skin and had been growing for longer than nine months. Growing since that first night when the doorknob turned and I learned that darkness had hands and breath and weight.

Noah was saying something. His mouth was moving but I heard other voices—the nurse from yesterday saying "blood pressure elevated," my mother saying "such an imagination," the voice in the dark saying "our special secret." They were all talking at once and underneath them was the beeping of machines that sounded like a countdown.

Margaret appeared. She'd been there before—was there for Paul's birth, but she'd also been there forever, the eternal nurse, the woman who saw what others missed. Her eyes catalogued: broken glass, spilt water, my rigid body, Noah's fear. She understood something. Not everything—how could anyone understand everything?—but something.

Paul disappeared with her. Good. Children shouldn't see their mothers become poems. Shouldn't watch them turn into metaphors for things that couldn't be said in proper words.

The room was smaller then. Or I was bigger. Or we were both the same size and that was the problem—there was only room for one consciousness here and there were three: mine, the baby's, and the girl I used to be who never really left.

"Your waters haven't broken," Noah was saying about the spilt glass, and I almost laughed because he didn't understand—all my waters broke years ago. I'd been drowning on dry land ever since. This was just the tide finally coming in.

The shadows in the corners were reaching toward me, and I recognised their fingers. They'd always been there, in every room I'd ever been in. Waiting. Patient. They knew what I knew: that some violations never end, they just change shape. Become pregnancies. Become children who reach for you with needy hands. Become husbands who think love can heal what love didn't protect you from.

The monitor read numbers that might have been heartbeats or might have been the combination to a lock I'd been trying to open since I was seven. 168. 172. 175. Almost there. Almost free.

When I screamed "GET IT OUT NOW!" I wasn't sure if I meant the baby or the memory or the glass shard I could feel calling to me from the bed, promising an ending that made sense, a poem that actually concluded instead of just stopping mid-line like my childhood did.

Everything was converging to a single point: the past, the present, the future that was about to become present. The glass was in my hand—when did that happen?—and it felt like coming home. Like the only honest thing in a room full of lies about safety and love and natural processes.

Noah's mouth was opening in slow motion. The light was catching the glass's edge, making it beautiful. Making it holy. This was my communion—blood given freely for once, body broken by my own hand instead of another's.

I was seven and twenty-two and ancient and unborn. I was the mother and the child and the space between them where violence lived. I was the glass and the hand that held it and the skin about to open like a book that had been sealed shut.

In one swift movement, I wrote the only poem that mattered.

The gown parted first—only it kept refusing to stay a gown. One blink and it was the child's dress with the buttons up the back, the one that other hands had always been the ones to undo; the next blink and it was hospital cotton again. This time, whichever it was, the hand undoing it was mine. Fabric had always been easier to cut through than silence. Then skin, opening like lips finally allowed to speak. The pain was white and pure and MINE. Finally, something that was mine. Finally, a choice I was making instead of having made for me.

But even as I did it, I was also watching from above, from the corner, from inside the spreading blood that was writing words on white sheets:

Here lies the girl who couldn't say no. Here lies the woman who finally said it. Here lies—

But that was Chapter Two's poem. This one ended with the cutting. With the choice. With the glass becoming key becoming pen becoming the thing that set us both free—the baby from me, me from the baby, all of us from the lie that biology was destiny and destiny was beautiful.

The last thing I saw before everything changed was Noah's face, and in his eyes I could see myself reflected: small, fierce, finally doing something instead of having things done to me.

It was the first time I'd really seen myself in years.

It was terrifying.

It was beautiful.

It was already over and just beginning and happening then, then, then—