The Glass House (Poem by Heather Smith)

THE GLASS HOUSE

 

I lived in a house made entirely of glass— not metaphorically, you understand, but actually: walls, ceiling, floor, everything transparent, everything seen through.

You'd think visibility would mean being seen, but glass plays tricks with light. From outside, I was a reflection of sky. From inside, I was nowhere to hide.

At night, when lights went on inside, I became a display, a diorama of a girl doing ordinary things: brushing teeth, reading, pretending to sleep.

People walked by, looked through me to the wall behind, the tree beyond, never noticing the girl between, frozen in the architecture of exposure.

The worst was learning to undress in a house without curtains, to change clothes quickly in corners that didn't exist, because circles have no corners.

But here's what glass teaches: how to live without privacy, how to perform the ordinary as if no one's watching when everyone could be.

I tried hanging sheets once, but they just made shadows, and shadows in a glass house tell more truth than light does.

So I became glass myself— transparent, breakable, something you could see through if you bothered to focus.

The house sang in storms, every surface a tuning fork for wind, for rain, for the breathing of strangers passing in darkness.

Once, someone threw a stone. It made a perfect hole, a star-shaped fracture that spread like truth through the wall, but the house didn't fall.

Glass is stronger than you think, can hold weight, weather pressure, can crack without shattering if it's tempered right.

I lived there from seven to twenty-two, though the deed was in someone else's name. They said I owned it, but ownership and imprisonment look identical in glass.

When I finally left, I took nothing— what possessions could survive such transparency? Everything I owned had been seen through, handled by eyes.

Now I live in a wooden house, walls you can't see through, doors that lock, curtains that close, and still I move like I'm made of glass.

Still I dress in the darkness, still I check every window twice, still I feel the eyes that learned to watch when watching was just living in my house.

They ask why I flinch in sunlight, why I prefer the corners of rooms. How to explain I grew up exposed, that privacy feels like theft?

The glass house still stands, I'm told, empty now but intact, a monument to transparency that concealed everything that mattered.

Sometimes I dream I'm there again, seven years old, learning to be seen through, learning that glass is just sand heated until it forgets how to be solid.

I wake up checking my walls, making sure they're opaque, that no one can see the girl inside who never left the glass house,

who still lives there, transparent, performing ordinary life for an audience that might or might not exist, in a house built entirely of pain.

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From Peter Cross's editorial notes for "Reflections by the Sea," 2001:

I told Heather this poem was too literal for the collection—the glass house metaphor felt heavy-handed compared to her usually subtle work. She looked at me for a long moment, then said, "What if it's not a metaphor?" I laughed, thinking she was joking about architectural choices. She didn't laugh back.

It wasn't until after her death, when Alice mentioned Heather's compulsive need for curtains, her terror of windows at night, her inability to change clothes unless completely alone, that I understood. The glass house was real. Maybe not architecturally, but experientially. A child who learns that privacy doesn't exist, that her bedroom has invisible walls, that someone is always watching—she grows up in a glass house regardless of what the walls are made of.

The stone through the wall—that was her pregnancy with Luke. The crack that spread but didn't shatter. And the line about being "seven to twenty-two"—exactly the span from her childhood trauma to her marriage. She lived in that transparent prison for fifteen years, then traded it for another kind of performance.

I wanted to remove the poem from the collection, thinking it was too obvious, too raw. Now I'm grateful she insisted on keeping it. It's the closest she ever came to saying: this happened, this was real, this is why I'm made of cracks.

The glass house still stands—inside every woman who learned too young that walls don't keep you safe, that being seen and being violated can be the same thing, that transparency is just another word for having nowhere to hide.