Sometimes she felt like she was drowning. Like her whole body was convulsing, gasping for air, her hands grasping for something to hold onto, her lungs pushing outwards, searching for oxygen, burning like a stab wound when none was found. Sometimes she felt like she could almost physically feel it, the water rushing over her, closing over her head, filling her nose and mouth, suffocating her cries. It was terrifying, but she’d be lying if she said there wasn’t an adrenaline rush as well, a hint of pleasure to go along with the pain. She was tired of fighting but she wasn’t tired of feeling. And if fighting for air made her feel then… it sort of made sense why she always had to struggle for breath. Maybe it was to ensure that she never stopped struggling, never ceased to fight for her life. Maybe it was to prevent her from giving up.

Her name was Rilla. And she was a hothouse flower.

She had heard of girls who complained because they were trapped in an ivory tower. That was not her fate, but there were days, months at a time in fact, when she honestly thought she would have preferred that to her glass prison. Girls who are put into towers have a chance of escaping. There are ladders to be climbed and keys to be jammed into old rusty locks and, in some old fairytales, long golden hair to be tossed out of tower windows. There is hope. There is always the possibility, however slim, that an opportunity for escape might eventually reveal itself. But that was not the case for her. Because her prison was a double-edged sword. Yes, it kept her inside, away from the world, away from the rain and the sun and a free, natural experience of life. But it also kept away all the bad things. It kept the danger at bay. It kept her alive.
So she stayed. Trapped inside the glassy walls, she tried to accept her identity as a beautiful decoration, something to be seen, to be marveled at, but never ever heard. She wore her beautiful dresses and danced for hours, twirling in circles, her hair flying straight out off of her shoulders, singing along with words she had never heard before and humming beautiful music that she always seemed to forget the minute it ceased to play. She was lovely. And so very useless. She hated that.

Sometimes she would lean up against the glass walls and breathe very hard, until her breath fogged up the glass and blocked out any glimpses of the outside world. Sometimes when she did that, she could forget. She could forget her feet were buried deep into the mud, that she was constantly standing still while the rest of the world rushed past her, a mere colorful blur against the white backdrop of all the human noise they were making. She could forget how often she struggled to feel as though she had not bloomed into a life of torturous captivity because she was inherently weak or unacceptable. She would strive to forget how, although she was told she was protected and confined because she was treasured for her unique beauty and intoxicating presence, she really felt as though she were permanently chained to a false ideal of dependence on other people’s opinions, an ideal that over the years she had truly come to hate.

But then over time she would forget why she had wanted to block all of this out in the first place and would begin to doodle in the condensation left on the glass, drawing patterns and designs and beautiful, looping calligraphy spelling out her own name over and over. Rilla. Rilla. Rilla. And slowly, her own name, her own identity would reveal the paradise outside of the glass, smearing away the last of the foggy barrier she had put up between herself and the memories of all she couldn’t have and revealing how little she was once again. And then the pain would come back, and with the pain, the feeling. The endless feeling. The beautiful, shocking, familiar feeling.
And it was wonderful. And terrible.
At night she would lie awake studying the stars as they shimmered above the ceiling of her glass palace, her own personal, gorgeous form of life support. She would pretend the constellations were whispering to her, telling her the secrets of their travels across the night sky. She sometimes wondered if the stars felt as trapped as she did, always spinning so predictably around and around like a top, painting the same pictures in the sky every night and being drowned out by the sun’s brilliance during the day like clockwork. But then she would notice the rebellious ones. The stars that streaked across the sky instead of staying in their places, which traveled across the heavens despite the familiar patterns and the endless spinning that seemed to inhibit such movement. And it would give her hope, if only for a night, that one day she might follow these stars to where ever they were running to. She could imagine it. A paradise, somewhere at the end of the universe, filled with all the runaway stars she had ever seen, burning as brightly as ever, delighted with themselves for masterminding such a clever escape. And she would be there too. Finally free from the glass walls. Finally free to be something more than a hothouse flower.

Some days when the sun was at its hottest and the whole hothouse seemed too warm and too close to the equator and too small to hold her, she wondered what would happen if she just walked out. Opened the door and left. Tore her roots up from the ground beneath her feet and transplanted herself. But then she reminded herself that she already knew the answer to that. They had told her. She would die. Wither away. Parched and alone, buffered by winds and rain, with the only thing she had to her name, her beauty, ripped away from her in her final moments as she lay dying. She wasn’t strong enough to survive on her own. Whether she liked it or not she need the shelter her prison provided. She needed to be protected. On her own she would kill herself in second. Transplanting wasn’t an option for her if she wanted to continue to live.
So she would turn away from the door and go back to sunning herself in the light, trying not to feel cramped or ungrateful or unhappy or suffocated. But the feeling that she couldn’t breathe was worst at those times. Those times when she realized how easy it would be for her to stop breathing forever.
And then one day, the storm came.

The clouds came from nowhere it seemed, rolling up over the horizon and covering the familiar patch of sky above her little world, blocking the first stars of the evening from view. At first she just lay there, watching the clouds expand and fly around the sky, propelled by the wind and turn darker with every passing second, but eventually she couldn’t just lay there anymore and she got up and paced back and forth, feeling anxious and excited and not quite understanding why. The rain came next, falling in sheets, turning the Earth into a puddle. It buffeted the sides of the hothouse, slamming into the glass so hard Rilla almost thought it seemed like a warning. The thunder and lightning started up next, bright flashes of white light, crackling with heat and power, coming nearer and nearer until she could have sworn she could smell the smoke ,followed by the deep fierce boom of the thunder, as though God himself were throwing boulders down from Heaven. She watched in awe as the world seemed to turn inside out on itself and the Paradise she had so often yearned for dissolved into a stream of raindrops so continuous it seemed like a tidal wave coming down from the sky.

At first she barely noticed the hail. It came in the form of such tiny, little chunks of ice, and dwarfed as it was by the large raindrops, it just seemed unimportant. It fell against the glass, tinkling lightly, and still she thought nothing of it. She was so transfixed by the storm that she didn’t even notice that it had grown larger, and that the tinkling sound above her had evolved into a pounding. She was so secure in her little world that she never once thought about how fragile that world was until the first crash came. Until the sky gave way.
A particularly large hailstone crashed through the glass ceiling and landed mere feet away from her. She screamed and jumped away as a gust of wind and rain followed it, soaking the floor and the glass shards lying splintered all around. For a minute she just stared at this unwanted invader, waiting for something else to happen, on the alert for another disaster at any minute. But nothing happened. And finally, her pulse started to slow. She slowly relaxed her tense shoulders. She took a deep breath. She was safe.

And then the world ended.

Suddenly gigantic hailstones came smashing down from every side it seemed and glass was raining down too, like deadly shrapnel. She ran back and forth, trying to avoid it as she watched her carefully constructed haven get ripped to shreds piece by piece. The rain lashed at her and the lightning streaked down so close she was afraid it would touch her and the chaos was so unstoppable that she couldn’t even scream. She could only close her eyes and feel the glass scrape her skin and wait for it to end. Wait for the horror to be over. Wait for everything to be as it had been again. She was lashed by the wind and the rain and the glass like a whip, and then suddenly… there was only darkness.

When Rilla opened her eyes she was lying half-buried under a pile of wreckage. She reached up and touched her head and felt an increasingly tender bump there. She was bleeding and confused and disoriented. She sat up and looked around her. And then she gasped.
The hothouse was destroyed. Not just destroyed. Obliterated. Every single pane of glass had shattered and the iron and wooden framework had been partially knocked over, leaving everything hanging at a precarious angle on one side of it. Pots and flowers were overturned and everywhere she looked she saw only disaster and despair. She let her gaze travel over the remains of her old life and felt her heart drop. This was it then. Her life support was no more. Death and failure were inevitable, and coming soon. She bent her head, defeated.

And then something amazing happened. She caught a glimpse of her own reflection in a piece of shattered glass lying on the ground. Her eyes widened. She picked up the piece of glass with shaking fingers and held it up higher towards the sun’s light, to make sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her. But no. With her other hand she trailed her fingers over her face and watched her reflection do the same. It was real then. Her reflection in this piece of glass was really her. And she was… beautiful. Still. Even without the protection of the glass walls she had been forced to stay behind. Even when set free from her prison. She was not dying. She was not withering away. She was very much alive, even with her roots exposed to the full splendor of the sun’s rays. She was bleeding, she was scarred, she was uncertain and overwhelmed, but she was free. At last. She was really free.
She picked herself up slowly, her legs shaking, but holding steady beneath her weight. She took a deep breath or two, accustoming her lungs to the taste of real, fresh air, light without the heavy haze of guilt and disappointment clouding it. She tilted her face up towards the sky and closed her eyes, allowing herself to rejoice for a moment in her escape. And then she walked to the door, with each step growing surer, more ready for whatever awaited her in the paradise she had dreamed of for so long. The door was skewed, knocked part way off its hinges, but still standing, a final barrier between her and everything she had hardly dared to allow herself to want. No matter what they had said about her being too weak, too helpless, and too young to survive without her glass prison, she knew now they had been lying. It was time to set herself free. Time to knock the final barrier down.
Her fingers closed around the knob.
She pulled the door open.
She stepped out into the light.
Her name was Rilla. And she was a hothouse flower.
But not anymore.