Porcelain
I stood helplessly as I watched her turn to glass in front of me. It started at her eyes, frosting over to crystalline perfection, and spread throughout her body, shaking so violently I was afraid to place my hands around her. My biggest fear was watching her hit the floor and shatter. I wrapped my arms around her, trying to keep the cracks from breaking her beautiful figure, and worrying the entire time that the pressure I placed upon her would be what pushed her over the edge.
She whispered into my neck words that ceased to end, and all I could do was remain a shoulder for her. She was falling, I could feel it, and she stopped reaching for my hand long before I was ready to stop trying to catch her.
I’ve seen her broken like this once before, and I’d love to say that I was part of the reason she was put together. But just as this time, I am destroying her, last time I couldn’t break her fall.
Love is a silly thing. You would get sucked into a rip tide, go out into a blizzard dressed in white, lay in the middle of a street with a semi truck barreling forward, you would do anything in the world as long as it made that person happy. You forget for awhile that you even exist, and all you see is her.
If the person you love is weaker than you are, you go through endless measures to stay strong for them. You create barriers between them and the rest of the world so nothing can get through without your consent. You are the bouncer to the nightclub known as life, and you gladly take your position.
Even still, no matter how closely you guard those doors, something can still happen, and here you are, watching the love of your life crashing. If life were an operating table, you would be the surgeon praying to God that your scalpel doesn’t slip. If life were a dream, you’d be beside her waking her before she started screaming out in pain.
Rather than being something fixable, however, life tears her apart. She’s broken, breaking, something you would more than readily take from her, but it is hers to bear. All you can do, all I can do at this moment is be stable, be that person that she craves more than anyone else to fall apart in front of.
I take her face in my hands feeling her hot tears soak through the creases in my fingers and it burns straight to my heart. She tells me she just can’t do this anymore and I try to keep from breaking for her. I’ve never known a hard life, yet she has already been through so much. The burning in my heart quickly escalates to anger at everyone and everything that has ever wronged her.
If her eyes weren’t already upon me, every wall in the room would be broken beneath my fists, but I know my anger scares her so I keep myself in line. I wonder if she knows her sadness kills me. If looks could actually kill as everyone says they could, the sadness in her eyes would have stopped my heart the first time I met her.
She has had everyone in her life leave her. Some made the decision themselves to leave, others had God make the decision for them. I swore to her that I would never leave her side, and I am still trying to reassure her this very moment. She refuses to hear me as I expected. She assumes that she will always be let down. Yet here I am, waiting for the day she’ll let me prove that I am not going anywhere.
When her sobbing ebbs faintly, I release my hands from her face and wait for her reaction. If she starts falling again, I will catch her. Instead, she sits for a moment, probably contemplating running out the door as she usually does once this passes, but instead, she takes me, wraps my arms around her and embraces me.
“Thank you.” Her words are like air to me and I breathe off of them. Just as I am attempting to keep her afloat, she sends me a life raft.
Some day she will know that I will be the one to save her, until then, every time I watch her turn into something so breakable, I will be by her side. As long as she keeps running to me, I will not leave her.
Once more I draw her into me, pretending that I am so much stronger than I actually am. And I just hold her, until I feel the glass peel away from her, leaving only scarred skin. Someday, I will be the one to save her. Today, I am just the one to bring her back from battle.
