Crackle Glass Heart

A friend of mine looked at me across the table and raised an eyebrow.

“Maybe you’ll learn not to give your heart away so easily.”

Maybe. But probably not.

This, the day after I received two gorgeous wine glasses because the crackle design at the base reminded the giver of me. Broken, but beautiful, and still capable of serving their function.

Certainly, there is always room for improvement, and for me that will almost always mean moving towards the middle from an extreme and exercising more self-control in my words and actions. To take the position that I couldn’t be a little calmer, a little slower, a little more controlled is ludicrous. I’ve been learning how and when to keep my mouth shut for thirty one years, and the adventure continues.

Still, I much prefer my particular plight over the alternative.

Despite how hard it is on my heart and my pride, I prefer being emotionally intense and expressive to lacking the insight required to understand the inner workings of my heart and the courage to be sincere.

When I put the glasses away, I stopped for a minute and held one up to the light. I ran my fingertips over the grooves of the cracks, over the blending of the two pieces of glass- the smooth top half and the textured bottom half. The sun caught in the bottom of the glass and I spun the stem around, watching the light bounce off of all the different shapes and patterns.

The transparency of glass is what gives it the capacity to reflect and magnify light. It is capable of withstanding extreme temperatures, but not extreme fluctuation in temperatures. That’s how the crackle effect is obtained- by plunging very hot glass into very cold water- and the result is a thousand tiny cracks. The pieces is then reheated and sealed with a layer of smooth glass to seal the cracks while leaving them visible.

Yeah, I’ll own that.

Tomorrow night, after all the fudge has been given out and the soup is on the stove, I’ll open a bottle of white wine and fill up one of those pretty new glasses.

My first toast will be to that which is made more beautiful, if also more fragile, for its transparency and responsiveness.

My second will be for all those poor souls who would have me trade my crackle glass heart for the tin that keeps them safer, but so much colder and harder, infusing whatever it holds with a bitter aftertaste.

I can imagine living the rest of my life alone because I never found a love worth working for, but I cannot imagine wasting a minute of this life because I wasn’t willing to do the work.

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