and I'm the kind of love it hurts to look at, but once I was enough to make you try
now, I'm underneath the rubble, trying not to feel the trouble.
He is no longer afraid.
He is older now and more confident in the glass.
He has learned everything there is to know about how it expands and contracts as he breathes, how it sometimes shudders as if it were real flesh, how the cracks splinter but do not come apart.
It is stronger than he thinks it is.
And, as a result, so is he.
He is no longer meek.
He does not tiptoe, pays much less mind to the terrain, cares little where he puts his feet. Because the earth has taken him to his knees and it has not broken him. Because he has learned that it’s all right to fall because he can get right back up.
But he is still kind and good and soft.
He is still filled with all that hunger. A desperate want to swallow up all the world has to offer him. He wants to travel, still, to the very edges of the earth just to see what’s there. He thinks of his sister sometimes, how when he’d press his mouth to her shoulder in the morning she’d smell like the sea. She’d smell like someplace he’d never been before. He thinks of how she’d lied to protect him and how it had harmed them both.
He wanders now and he studies the world unfurling around him rather than the next place he’s going to step. It fills him with breathless wonder. How beautiful it all is, filled up with fantastical creatures with wings and horns and scales and magic he knows nothing about. He remembers a girl he met once, how she’d warned him not to come closer because she broke things without meaning to. Even beautiful things. He wonders still what kind of magic that was.
He moves with new confidence. Because he is no longer a child. He is leggy still, yes, but he is beginning to fill out. He is beginning to take the shape of what he’ll be for the rest of time. (He knows that he’ll live forever, he can feel it in his veins, a gift and a curse inherited from his father). He is no longer red, the color having drained from the glass over the course of a year. How funny, he thinks, that he’d started out looking like his mother – just like her, red glass – and has ended up more closely resembling his father. At least in color. Because Jarris is not made of glass, though perhaps he ought to be.
He is no longer red, but a storm cloud behind a windowpane. And perhaps he is handsome or perhaps he is not, Thomas has never known the difference.
He moves with new ease regardless, grateful to be rid of the shackles of his fear. And he occasionally stops and turns his head to press his mouth against his own shoulder, reveling in the heat that collects on the glass’s surface.
THOMAS
— and you don't care for me enough to cry —
@[Colby]