this happiness possesses the fragility of freshly painted walls, so easily marred by an accidental shoulder brush, exposing the dingy grey beneath, once white, like the balloons we hung outside the house when we moved in, but they fell, at the leisure of the wasted breath I filled them with, though now, now it is just the stone floors and I, and a silence that is not quite a silence, more so the whispers of a church, or the sound that a cloud makes as it drifts away, there and then gone, without warning, a glass figurine propped against a doorstop- one hard push and it will crumble into glacial shards, crystalline dust that I will piece back together, even though the scars will always be visible, and that is fine, wonderful even, because it is so beautifully human, and because perfection is a plateau, and I would rather climb a ladder of rotten wood because each rung unbroken is a step up, and because I love the way my heart jumps anxiously against my rib cage whenever I stop to look down.