Glass

Written August 2023

Notes: This one gets pretty heavy, so warnings for intrusive thoughts and descriptions of violence

You keep thinking about hitting someone with your car.
You can’t get it out of your head. It’s unintentional. It would be unintentional, if you were to do it.
If you were to hit someone with your car, you wouldn’t mean to. You don’t want to hit someone with your car. But it might happen.
You stare at children in the school zone. You stare at them and imagine hitting them with your car. You put your eyes back on the road. You don’t want to hit a child with your car.
You can hear their parents crying. You can see a gravestone, a framed picture of the kid smiling, the casket, the funeral. You can taste the tears. You might be fired from your job. You might be interviewed on the local news. Everyone would hate you. Everyone would hate you for killing a child with your car.
You pull into your driveway and turn off your car and lay your forehead on the steering wheel. You wring the tension out of your body like a sponge. You didn’t hit anyone. You didn’t kill anyone. You can stop shaking.

You keep thinking about setting your house on fire.
You double check and triple scheck each appliance in your kitchen. You don’t light candles, but you check for them anyway. You unplug all your lamps when you’re done with them. You buy new batteries for your smoke detector.
You tell your dog that you love her every time you leave, just in case you come back to find her dead.
You can smell the smoke. You can smell the smoke. You’re in your office at work and you can smell the smoke at home. You almost tell your coworker that you think your house is on fire, but you would sound insane if you did that. You clock out early, and on the drive home you imagine hitting a cyclist with your car. You imagine turning into your street to see a fire truck and all of your things destroyed.
You pull into your driveway. You feel like throwing up. Your house is uncharred. Your car isn’t bloodied. You give your dog two treats and lay with her by the TV. You’re so glad she’s alive.

Your mom calls you on Friday. You stare at your phone and let it ring. You think your brother has died. You think he’s gotten into an accident– worse, he’s been murdered. It’s sudden, it happens. You think he has a terminal illness. You don’t know what you’ll do without him. You never connected enough, while he was alive.
You let it ring out all the way, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes, and then feel awful and immediately call her back. She tells you that she got a promotion at her job, and you tell her that you’re happy. You ask how your brother is doing, and she says he has a lot of homework.
You say goodnight to your mom, you tell her you love her, and that you love your brother, and to tell him that.

You need to put the pizza in the oven. You need to eat dinner. Your mom bought you a frozen pizza for the weekend and you need to put it in the oven.
It sits, heavy, cold, on the stovetop. The oven has been preheated for 15 minutes now. The pizza is wet as it thaws. You’re standing in the middle of your kitchen. You need to put the pizza in the oven.
Your dog has eaten before you. You put the mitts back on. You pick up the tray with the pizza. You lean over the oven, and the heat hits your forearms. You see yourself dropping the pizza, shattering the glass of the oven door. You scorch your arms and your hands on the metal tray and topple into the oven. You have to quit your job because your hands are too burnt to use a keyboard, to do much of anything.
You put the pizza back on the stovetop. Then slide it back into the cardboard box and put that in your freezer. You turn off the oven. You eat a peanut butter sandwich for dinner.

You think there is someone in your house.
After eating, you’d sat down on the couch and put on a movie that you had never heard of and you don’t care about. You think there is someone in your house. You can hear their footsteps. Creaking and pausing. You hear the draft from the window they climbed in through. You think of how you opened the window the other day and maybe you forgot to lock it again. You are paralyzed.
Your dog is asleep on her bed and seems unbothered. You’re terrified for her.
You pause the movie and sit there in silence for minute after minute. You hear something move in the back of your house.
You yell hello, and is anyone there, and there is no response. Why would there be? There’s someone in your house.
You’re more scared than you ever have been. You imagine a shadow running across the floor, and bright hot gunshots and dying and you rot here for days without being discovered. Maybe your mom finds you. She’s worried, she comes looking. She will never be the same after seeing her child with a hole between the eyes.
You decide you want to die in your sleep, and so you turn off the tv, and you take the blanket from the back of the couch and you lay down. And you close your eyes with it over your head like a child. And you feel stupid. And you’re so scared.