Breaking

Just after I turned 30 my life completely fell to pieces, and in its falling it stuck like glue to new positions and angles, completely unexpected designs and sharp edges. Leaning through the new pathways created by this restructuring I found myself being sliced deeply, bleeding from my center, thick pools of life force flowing live a river out of me. The shell left behind stares blankly at me now. I flick at her face. "Wake Up!" I want to scream, and a horse dryness holds the words on the other side of my disembodied self. The force of the scream reverberates through the alien structure I now inhabit. I try, without success, to peal away the layers. I scrape at the eyelids that give this version of vision. Cranking my head side to side, I try to make it rotate in all directions, it is encumbered by a few singular views. Pointless. It could be said it happened cause of a baby, or a boy, and then maybe a baby. Again. None of the answers are complete. They are all just part of this tumbling of artifice, this making of nothing out of all the things that I could have made, why this? I inhale now deeply. I feel the holes in my face working as they are meant to and color seems to seep back in. But even as it fills me I bleed. Draining out empty. I am a sandcastle. No sooner do I build up, then an inevitable wave crashes me down. Around me I try desperately to create a barricade. Still I have started too close to the shore. Too close to the waves. I think of a new lover. Her hair is a mixture of toffee and cocoa. She smiles wryly at all times and she moves into me. "Be the River, not the Rock." she says. The river is so hard to break, made of water, not glass.