Handle With Care

Something broke today.

Something small and precious, a glass flower, a snowflake, a heart. Something untouchable for its fragility, something broken much to easily, never to be healed again. It made no sound, no dying screams or pitiful whimpers, its passing was slow and barely noticed, noted only by outsiders with jaded eyes. It's gone now, spirited away and never to be seen again. Earlier and earlier it breaks, shatters, and falls away spreading itself across the floor and cutting the feet of everyone who walks upon it, unaware of the blood pouring from their bodies, slicking the shards and staining pure white red.

Something broke today.

It breaks everyday to be honest, many many times by many many people, simultaneously across the world. It does not matter what they were before It breaks, but after they are soldiers, watching the light fade to darkness and unable to do anything but watch with ancient eyes. It's difficult for these jaded soldiers to remember what life was like before it broke, when the world was bright and whole and the sun shone every day and there was always a reason to smile. It is so very difficult to remember what was lost, to remember what life was like, before the breaking. The memories become smudged so very quickly, seen through older eyes, and the precious simplicity of these halcyon days is cracked and blurred until the memories either break or fade away. There's no going back after this point, sometimes broken things just can't be fixed, sometimes they're meant to remain broken, and the world is sometimes better for it in the end. But that doesn't make it any less sad.

Something broke today.

The children became adults, but no one can remember just when this occurred, they only notice after it happens, after the bowing, the straining, and the cracking under pressure until it finally breaks and shatters across the floor under the weight of the world. When does it happen? When does a child become an adult, jaded eyes smearing memories with bitterness and so-called wisdom until they either break or fade away? When did the world turn its back just long enough for the children to grow jaded eyes? Is there an age, a fixed point in time that declares that the breaking must occur? Is there a rite of passage, unspoken and unknown but acknowledged all the same? And the soldier march on, over the glass shards of something precious broken and with bloodied bare feet they trample the bodies of their former lives as children. But when, when does this happen? Why?

Something broke today.

It broke, and with the broken pieces we build again. Creating cities and people and walls higher then the heavens to keep people out with the bloodied shard of something broken. Higher and higher the walls go, until the city and its people are enclosed completely within a dome of bloody glass. The glass city become larger, and the glass people become wiser and nothing ever gets out and no one ever comes in. Life created from the shards of something broken, recreated as something safer and wiser, more weary of people then before. The walls become higher and thicker with time, and the blood stains crust and brown until they become the dirt beneath the feet of the glass citizens of the glass city inside the bloody glass walls. And all this is because something broke and shattered and soldier shredded their bare feet over the shards in proffered penance, their blood becoming the glue that holds the glass dome that protects the glass city and its people together. Because fragile things are never treated with the tenderness they deserve.

And then innocence shatters.