This is Glassdom.
Allow me to describe: the trees along the city’s broad boulevards, those I thought to be poplar—they are glass, as is much else. I needed some time to realize that the trunks are cloudy, white glass. Ice-like. The city’s inhabitants, should you look for them, pass through the streets via store vitrines. They flash by upon panes, this way. I’ve lived here for the better part of a year. Sometimes, I can see myself in those vitrines, too, and I almost mistake myself for a local figurine.
Each morning, when I wake in my studio apartment, I hear glassfall. The sound is not the garbage collection crew tilting bins full of empty bottles into a truck’s belly, as I initially thought. It’s glassfall—a rain that chimes and glitters the street come first rays of brilliant-cut sun, heralding glasnost. With it I wake, briefly peer at my personal black glass, marveling at the void, then shuffle to the bathroom, where I estimate my unkempt self in the tall mirror, already noticing how glassy some hairs on my beard, my brows, my head, begin to appear. I pluck one, no longer in the confused annoyance of before, that regrettable reverence of a brunet state of being, and hold it up close. Yes, I see, the hair is glass, no longer keratin. So, the city is taking hold. I step outside eventually, after a few minutes in a rain-shower, where the water rushing down looks like you-already-know-what, running rivulets on me, into me, pooling under me. I, of course, brushed and flossed my teeth as well, making sure to get those flexile, glasslike bristles, filaments, in between my gums and teeth, every crevice, to draw blood if so they wish, if my health isn’t up to par, as my body adjusts to this way of living. Outside, from the trees, ‘things’ fly about—it is spring, and so small tufts overtake the skies, everywhere the wind flies. These are cotton-embowered seeds; they float and swirl by, and should you breathe in one such dwarf-cloud, do not be surprised by the germination taking root. And upon closer inspection, if you kneel to pick up the weightless wonders, or pluck one from the wind’s singing, mischievous grasp, you’ll see how the seeds take to the skies with the help of minute fibers, as fiberglass. That word—you worry? Perhaps you’ve heard of the havoc fiberglass can wreak on our lungs. Well, it may be so. Here, it’s how the city marks you, should you stay. I admit, some days I do cough. It is persistent, unpleasant, and I briefly wonder why; I reach for medicine, till I remember the process. I imagine those fibers inside me, flooding the alveoli, slashing entry into my already vitreous veins, capillaries, those bloodways, in lieu of oxygen. Well, so be it, I say, for it is long overdue for something new. With my carbon ways I’ve done all I had energy for, the motivation—and more than enough stimulation. So, remake me in unfeeling silica, why don’t you? Make me pretty, transparent, and brittle—or amorphous, bubbling red, if the sun finds impurity, offense, and beams down to make me melt. That I do dread, if only a little. But nonetheless, glass me, yes, roughly, so the shards glint in my pomegranate lips, my ribboned cheeks, so in glassly transparency my honesty will need to struggle ‘gainst opacity, treachery, and mendacity no more. In glass, virtues will refract and burst sevenfold as spectrum from every sculpted organ and limb I hold. Omnidirectional. It will be bright, and so bold.
So, you see? It’s why I moved here; my last chance to be.
Alexei Raymond, editor at Blood+Honey, offers his heart, shaped by life and love in the Middle East. He chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications.