Happy 100 Days: 27

A friend who is concerned about me giving up on love because it all just seems too damned hard sent me a song called Glass by Thompson Square.
 
We may shine, we may shatter,
We may be picking up the pieces here on after.
 
Watching this girl stand as stiff as a cake topper while trying to sing made me giggle. How come the dude gets to wear a jacket? She needs a shawl and a cozy pair of jeans. Of course, the chill is probably all mine. Love songs do have a way of giving me the shivers. Maybe this means I can tell my friend that not all the romance has been beaten out of me.
 
We are glass? I’m not sure if I’m there yet. I wonder which popular building material would better describe me at this stage of the game.
 
I’m thinking plexiglass: Functional. Marred, scratched, a little too cloudy to get a clear line of sight. Impenetrable. Indestructible. Not very pleasant to the touch, but quite practical for situations in which people and events are moving too fast for proper care.
 
Someday in the near future, I’d like to go for something a little more pliable. A willow branch or bread dough on the rise or something. I need a few intermediary steps before I’m ready for glass.
 
This has me wondering. Why glass, anyway? That metaphor belongs to swelling country ballads, not to me. If I get to choose the image I aim to create for this healing heart, I will go for something better suited to the woman I believe I am becoming.
 
I am milkweed pod. I am milk. I am down feather over hollow bone. I am dawn warming the frost from blades of grass. I am the wind lifting debris from the gutter and churning it to flight. I am clay, I am the wheel, I am the hands.
 
As for the next love? We are below the soil in an unmade bed. We are bulb, dug up by an aimless squirrel and carried far from the garden we believed was our home. In the new season still a thousand years away, we are volunteers pushing up through the thawing skin, opening into deep wilderness where nothing like us has ever grown before.
 
There. How’s that for not giving up?