I grew up building a glass castle around me, pane by pane by pane of glass. The glass was clear, and beautiful, and it let in the columns of sunlight, which pooled around the floors of my castle. My castle was so warm, and so comfortable, and so safe that I continued building the castle higher and higher, until I could no longer see the sky.

And then one day I saw a crack in one of my windows, a small spidersweb in the glass, slowly but surely spreading, reaching up and up and up-

And I realized that my castle was shuddering, and cracking, and crumbling. I knew that the longer I waited the less prepared I would be, for it had been years and years since I had been Outside.

And so I took up my fists and pounded the walls of my castle, raging and fighting against the unfairness of it all, the way that the world was taking away my heart-stoppingly beautiful home.

But my actions hurt my fists, and so I stopped, because pain was so unfamiliar to me.

I sat, and cried, and as I looked around me I saw the time and effort I had put into this place, this place where I would never be hurt or pushed or bothered.

I sat, and sat, and looked above me, where the spiraling panes of glass twinkled like the stars outside, and I was terrified that I would die without my castle.

So I lay down, and felt the vibrations of my crumbling world, and was ready to die, when suddenly underneath, I felt the motions of the earth.

I lay there, watching my world shatter into pieces, and felt nothing, because at that moment I had felt their world moving, and heard the songs of their stars, and breathed in the deep of their ocean.

And then I saw that there were thousands of glass castles just like mine. There were ruined castles, and stained castles, and crumbling castles, and strong, thick castles. And there were people in those castles too.

I wondered who those people were. Were they like me? Were they scared too? If they were, I lay there thinking, maybe we could be scared together. And my hopes of ending my fears carried me up, up from the ground, and I stood in the middle of my falling castle.

I knew that in order to shatter this jagged fear I needed to step outside, and so I used my finger to tap, gently, lovingly, against the glass, telling it goodbye.

And then I waited, and watched the panes crashing down, so terrible and beautiful and sad, singing with a desperate, crying melody that I knew was their goodbye to me.

And when the singing ended I put one foot out and-

recoiled, because the sunlight was too bright-too fierce-too hot-too orange-

and then I knew that I had begun my journey, my journey into each and every one of those castles, my journey to create tiny, spiderwebs of cracks in their glasses, so that in the end, we could all stand in the ruins of what had been our castles and look at each other, and think, so this is how it is. So this is what it is like to live.