The Glass

I touch both worlds, and they touch me. Oh, the things I could see if I only could see. If I could feel or think. Schools circle and cycle through the space, a steady flow of traffic around me. To the left, the school is wide-eyed students, and to the right, bug-eyed fishes.

What does aquarium glass experience? Immense pressure on one end, a welcome place to crumble on the other. I choose to hold strong, to let the artificial currents caress me. Sometimes, I am rewarded by a toddler’s kiss. They always press their faces to me for a better look. When the sharks bump into me, they do it to move beyond me. But the children in awe of those multi-toothed drones? We share the experience together. Their fingerprints linger and I feel like someone is holding my hand long after the lights are shut off. It doesn’t matter that everyone looks past me, as long as I remember I was once held.

I do still love the sharks, all the fishes I hold. What fingerprints are for me, I want to be for the waterlogged masses. I can not help but feel a heavy guilt when I think about them too long, where they were meant to be. These are the times when I look to the dry floor with the most longing. I must never forget what would happen to each fish if I were to give way, how the air would steal oxygen from them rather than give it. I know both forms of oxygen well, and I can’t decide which is friendlier. Perhaps it is not so simple as one or the other.

The languages of air and sea are so different. A constant stream of two completely opposing genres grating against me, or soothing me depending on the day. I try not to get lost in the liminal space, the meeting place where so much constantly collides but can never be allowed to cross. I try to let each flow through and away, never absorbing what would weigh me down or crack me. First, there is just plain music, pumping through the speakers as steady as the water through the filters within my tanks. Next, there is the chaotic sound of land. This is the language of language, of dancing and learning. Here the sounds scratch at me, to take chips out of me until a vital weakness forms and I shatter. I would be forced to drop everything as I tumble to the ground, and I would, for the first time, be a part of the land sound. There is also the song of the water, a slow and sultry crescendo and crash. Bubbles skitter and pop, everything is muffled. These sounds can sneak up on me if they want to. They do not seek the grand and cacophonous destruction of me, not in the way of the land. Submergence changes the way you perceive and analyze. The water songs have the patience to wear me down like a river through a mountain, carving out a valley so deep it reaches sea level. Even audio knows where it is meant to be.

So, then, what of my song and my place? The octopus circumvents me at night, and I do not know whether to feel failure or freedom. Why does he always return? I wonder if this cage could be a comfort, if I could be. I am fond of this octopus, whom I hate. He lives not in the border, but beyond it and me. Moving freely between the worlds I exist to hold separate. I stand in place, ever the serious sentry. My molecules do actually move just the slightest bit. Like the perfect summer’s day, a light breeze across the sand. The air gently picks up grains and brings them to the sea, the waves gently return them soon after. A balance of physical forces, of push and pull. This breathing of silicon dioxide and quartz. The harmonious whistle across an invisible, perhaps imaginary, barrier. What is glass, but the tempered sand of a cyclical shoreline?