Broken Glass
a minor preoccupation
The slam of a neighbor’s door reverberated down the hallway and through my flimsy apartment walls. I barely caught a shadow hopping past the corner of my left eye before I heard a heavy clunk, a small delay, and then a smash. For a bewildering second, I thought I might have a ghostly visitor with a penchant for throwing things acting out in my living room. Rather, the combination of my neighbor’s heavy hand and the thin walls had sent a decorative glass ball flying off a shelf with such velocity that it looked more like a major league pitch. The ball jumped across the floor once, twice, and then spat barely visible pieces of glass in all directions. I gasped too loudly at the sound of impact. The kind that start starts low and breathy and ends in a squeak.
I could feel a slight spike in my blood pressure as I looked for a clear path to my shoes. As luck would have it, the ball fell in such a way that tiny shards of glass jumped into the shoe tray near the door. Not wanting to risk a prickly pair of shoes, I picked a tall pair of boots as far from the contaminated area as possible. Then I began the broken glass cleaning ritual. A Meijer bag for housing the mess and making a quick escape to the dumpster. Meticulous hands for a thorough and cut-free cleanup. Damp paper towel to grab sneaky escapees. A broom as a final measure. All the while, I maintained an acute awareness of how ridiculous I must look on my hands and knees, wearing clunky winter boots that climbed halfway up my calves, and wiping down five square feet of my living room floor with a wet paper towel. Some might call this overkill. Or an overreaction. Or anxiety. Or some acronym bestowed upon people by their therapists (I say this lovingly towards my own therapist). But I think there is something else at play that lies in the gray area of fear and anxiety and, up until now, I haven’t placed a finger on that thing.
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Shattered glass has always been something I’ve been unusually nervous about. It doesn’t keep me awake at night. I don’t obsess over it. It doesn’t shake me to my core or leave me completely incapacitated. But the presence of it agitates my senses. I remember the first association I had with broken glass. My dad had recently married his second wife, and I was quickly coming up on five years old. It was summertime, and if I wasn’t in a bathing suit, I had surely just changed out of one for dinner. I was being babysat by my dad’s mother-in-law—my step-grandmother for a brief stretch of time. I remember her as a slightly severe woman who wouldn’t let me eat popsicles on her pool deck, although perhaps I only saw her as severe because she monitored where I consumed my Minute Maid juice bars. Her and her husband were bickering while cooking dinner, and she was making something in the blender. In my mind I’ve always pictured it as frozen margaritas, but that could just be wishful thinking. She dropped the blender, probably after reaching for it with wet hands and a hefty dose of annoyance towards her husband. An explosion of anger ensued. Livid words and warnings not to come closer to the ruined appliance pinged across the room. At the time, it felt like an overreaction as I peered around the kitchen island at the mess. Looking back, I can only imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to clean up a top of the line blender and a gallon of margarita mix off the floor. I feel her pain. Then she cut her hand. Not too bad. It was bloody but didn’t warrant a trip to the ER. Just enough to make the whole night sour and red.
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Perhaps my entire infatuation with broken glass can simply be attributed to this singular night of extremely run-of-the-mill childhood trauma. Maybe the reason it makes me over-concerned and over-agitated is because somewhere deep down that response was wired into me when a blender went tumbling out of my dad’s ex-wife’s mother’s hand sixteen years ago. I don’t know for sure, and I’m certainly not a professional on fear and anxiety (I suggest taking heed of this warning now). But I have been called a worrywart and an overthinker my whole life. This shattered glass kind of fear doesn’t feel like it falls under this umbrella. I’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. This shattered glass kind of fear doesn’t feel like it falls under that umbrella, either. So, where do we set fears that are both irrational and rational, physical and psychological? Fears that are fears rightfully so, but that also represent something fundamentally disconnected from the object or occasion in question? I think it’s a phenomenon that deserves its own space.