It always starts off with an alright scene. A bundle of joy held in the arms of an excited new mother, a bright and limitless future ahead of the untouched soul, a shining beacon of hope. Then, life takes its natural course and the path ahead is no longer devoid of difficulties. It becomes a plethora of stumbles and falls designed to keep even the strongest from succeeding.

I don’t know when the pain in my heart began to develop, the subtle heartache that began to replace my once happy heart and close me off from the rest of the world. With each difficulty I faced, a thick layer of glass began to take shape around me. As the pang in my heart gained momentum, the glass wall grew until I was fully enveloped.

As I watched the familiar faces that made up my world from behind the glass, a sullen frown formed upon my lips. It occurred to me that in a few years, these people would become insignificant to me. Just part of a group of faces I once knew.

Shrouded by all the uncertainty of how my life could turn out, I began to further retreat into the glass cocoon forming around me. The further back I crawled back in the cocoon, the more isolated I had become and the more heavily I felt the weight of expectations on my shoulders. The glass wall continued to thicken until I could no longer see the outside world. I was trapped, alone with only my thoughts to keep me company.

I could hear all the voices around me, I knew I was at the center of the lives that carried out on the outside, but I could not see nor experience anything that was happening firsthand. Every laugh, every yell, and every tear shed was a stab to my half functioning heart and soon, I felt nothing. I knew I was not alone, but I could not help but feel excruciatingly lonely.

Alas, I could take no more. With each stab, my heart grew an increasing immunity to pain, but as my mind took over my heart’s duties, it could bear no more pain. I robotically put my hand to my chest and slowly lifted my head to cry out to the heavens. I could not understand why throughout the systematic hurt, I was left feeling nothing. As my gaze lifted from the ground towards the sky, I caught a glimpse of a girl in the reflection of the glass. Heavy, dark circles enveloped her sunken eyes, her hair lay in stringy bunches around her shrunken face, and her lips arranged themselves in what seemed to be a permanent grimace. I had become a shell of my former self.

This girl in the glass, this girl that was at one point myself, so vivacious and full of life was now staring back at me from the glass that show every excruciating detail of the tolls that had been endured day on end. The girl in the glass was me, not dead, yet not fully alive. The ghost that stood in front of me bore holes in the mirror with her eyes. Two peculiar almond shaped eyes that seemed to have held all the unspoken horrors of the gift called life.

I stood frozen in the same position for unspeakable hours, observing, yet not speaking a word. This could not have been the same person who, only months ago, was happy just at the thought of being alive. I had let the world, the cold, harsh, unforgiving world, let me become another notch on its belt of broken souls.