Broken windows shatter like spiderwebs silent and shining they glitter under watery moonlight like diamond dust. Broken mirrors sing upon impact, the glass screaming high-pitched and pretty but broken-broken-broken it sounds like a nightingale when it dies. I watch my reflection and it blinks-blinks-blinks it winks at me and flashes a smile before it’s destroyed by my fist in its face, the blood seeping red crimson pretty shining dark and mysterious between mirror cracks. The windows take a metal baseball bat to the gut and they come to pieces in my hands, unwoven like string I pick up the pieces and bleed them red. The baseball bat whooshes when I swing at the air, I try to break that too but it won’t shatter like glass in my hands like people or friends or love it takes the hit and gets heavier, rests firmer on my shaking shoulders and I fall with a thud and the house groans and falls silent.

It’s so empty here.

I wake up hours later or seconds or minutes, raw moonlight bouncing off trillions of dust specks in the air it’s like a sandstorm if sand was soft. My cheek is against the splintered wood on the floor something sharp is digging into my flesh and I let out a sigh and stare. There is a window I cannot reach and it taunts me like bell chimes or children’s laughter, and in my head on the floor I imagine the sweet sound of glass breaking beneath my boot. It sounds like snow crunching underfoot. Crisp and sharp and beautiful, I want to ground the glass into dust or snowflakes.

So I stack up everything I can find, broken chairs rotting couches creaking tables hole-filled mattresses and I make a path to the window that laughs from on high, the glass that teases me like feathery fingertips alluring eyes devilish smiles and the tower sways and groans like there is wind but there isn’t any. The air here is dead.
I climb and I feel the wood shatter beneath my hands, hear the chairs finally fall apart smell the rotten innards of the moth-eaten mattress and stand on the table that screams under my weight, and I am still too short. The bat cannot reach the window even on my tippy-toes, and the tower sways something snaps! and I feel myself falling and see the window growing smaller, and I don’t think I feel and I throw the metal bat glistening under moonlight I throw it through the window and it shatters so pretty so perfect it’s almost enough to make me forget I’m falling.

I thud.

It hurts when I breathe. The raspy sound of rusted machinery comes from my throat and I spit up blood and sputum from my cracked lips, cracked like mirrors like windows like glass (my heart) it hurts it hurts (it beats against my chest flutters abnormally a butterfly in a cage) my ribs grind together something’s broken something’s wrong, I’m breaking from the inside out (freedom freedom FREEDOM) my lungs scream in agony, my blood feels like magma hot and thick, congealing in my veins and my vision spots, filled with moonlight and black spots and red. I look down and cannot recognize myself.

There is glass in my chest and my veins and my soul. It protrudes ugly and misshapen, grotesque parodies of something once whole but now not, something special in ruins my bloods slides thick on the edges of the glass, pearls of pretty crimson leaving streaks on once-clear it’s fascinating. I can see the glass and feel it shred my lungs and tear into my stomach, twist into my diaphragm and break off into my blood all at once.
Everything hurts.

My body aches. My spirit whimpers. My heart is broken. But I am fine, on the inside.

I’m absolutely perfect.