Once I was made out of sugar, then sand, then glass.
The more people touched me, the more the sugar turned to sand, then glass, and the glass ground down, sand-blasted, until it didn't feel right under anyone's fingers any more and people stopped. They asked me if I was alright. I said yes, just tired. When bees died on my window sill, I left them there. Anything I had to say that didn't get said fogged up inside me, and what I did say came out like smoke. Sometimes people thought I was a bong, but I wasn't.
I watched videos of Japanese farmers on the internet and thought about internment camps and their names - Heart Mountain, Topaz, Gila River. I stole other people's stories, pretended I was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, that we had gone to the beach together, and that she had brought something preserved for us to eat, and wore a swimsuit with a skirt and had a better body than anyone expected. I tried to imagine her telling me about Franklin, and what she said to him about the camps, and how nothing worked. I gave the story back because I didn't know what she would have called him, talking to me, and looking it up would only be cheating, and that would have been too much, after all the stealing.
I listened to the kinds of records that made you think that maybe there was something wrong with your record player. They were disorienting, like looking at something glass through something glass.
I planted cane berries and wore mittens made of grey glittering yarn that looked snowed on. The glass I was made of was thicker than you imagine, and not as clear. I turned amber, and matte, and looked jaundiced maybe, but not inhuman. Wearing zippers made me sound like a maraca.
Eleanor Roosevelt told me that we can only keep our own basic freedoms if we grant to others the freedom that we wish for ourselves. There really was something wrong with the record player. I wished for skin, and wore grey linen and started a new story set on the banks of the river Lethe.
