Touch Me Not

Touch Me…

There are walls and then there are walls.

Mine is tall and solid and circular, like some fantastical castle tower.  His is much the same though fortified with steel, and without even the one high window.  Mine just so happens to be made of glass, smooth and perfectly clear.  You can see right through to the center.

It would make more objective sense, considering my history, if I hid inside rough mortared stone like his and made everyone spend years scaling the rocks with their bare raw fingers and toes if they wanted in,  but for whatever reason, that has never been how it works.  The people who get inside do so effortlessly, often instantly, passing through the invisible barrier like ghosts.  The selection mechanism is both instinctive and imperfect.

Admittedly I had to work harder and with a greater sense of relentlessness to break through his walls than he did mine.  The greatest distress comeing from suddenly finding someone inside the wall when the logical part of my brain can't justify it, can't find any reason to trust that this person isn't going to skin me alive.

Then again at this point, I don't have any skin left.

So there you are, one of those for whom the walls were so much mist.  You're in, and I'm vulnerable, and so I've got to reconcile the emotional and rational parts of my brain as quickly as possible, by either deciding you belong here or shoving you back out and shoring up those sections that allowed you to pass through so effortlessly so that you stay out.

It's a stupid system.  It's the only one I've got.  There are many other kinds of walls: rough stone towers, rings of fire, murky moats both with and without drawbridges.  Sometimes I wish for another — one more opaque, more inviting, more cruel than my own.  I don't, however, ever wish to have no wall at all.

I don't have any skin left.  I still want to be touched, raw and sore as I am, but I can't bear the pain. Fear battles need.  I push more people back outside now than I once did, and I don't know whether I'm saving or punishing myself.

You, there. Yes. Come, touch the glass.