The Glass Room

There once was a woman God created for pain. He placed her behind glass walls and allowed her to watch the lives of many people, as they danced and proceeded through their daily routines. He gifted her with a clarity and vision that touched many people, and allowed her moments of happiness and pure joy. But he gave her a name, and that name was sacrifice. He made her beyond human; he created a world which revolved upon her choice- not her inability- never to venture beyond her glass wall. The world was created for other creations; for her there was only darkness and unimaginable pain. And all this existed in His name, because he had called upon her to be more than mortal. And she, with all that danced within her, was intimately acquainted with darkness and more than aware of everything she desired and wanted, was so cold always, shivering within the confines of a limited and impossible existence. And all she wanted she could have, if only she would venture beyond her glass room.

But she knew what depended upon her solitary station at her forbidden lighthouse, the watch she kept but did not comprehend. She knew the world and all who lay within it, but further, she knew that there was no one who existed for whom she could step outside her cage. There were only people to lead her from it, but no one to cause her to leave of her own volition. For in doing so she doomed those she loved, and she most of all doomed the one who would ask her to leave it.

And so she learned the art of pretense; she learned how to be made of steel, no, of iron. She learned how to be superhuman. She learned how to walk in ways that most are not required to walk, and she hated God at times for it, at the same time that she knew that each sacrifice that was required of her simply brought her closer to Him. It was as though he had chosen her to be His solitary representative in a universe filled with people; she alone existed to float through an ocean of, a sea of pain, stretching impossibly and implacably on.

This was her horizon; this was all that she could see. She watched people living out their lives and was glad for them, but at the bottom of her gladness was a fierce envy, a desire for what she could not have. She was something to people, but she could never be enough, and within the dark blaze of the world outside she seemed to realize that she had been created for this, placed in the world precisely for pain. It was only pain that moved her, pain that made her cry at night, pain that dominated, loved and beautified her, an exquisite darkness that played within her body so that she trembled, and could not stop trembling. Why God had chosen to make her so strong she did not know. She only knew that He had, and that she could not see the purpose in it...

She had an uncanny ability to maneuver the world, her own glass world, and pretend to be fine. But she also had an ability to believe, to believe the pretty words of people and also their pretty promises, to want so much to trust them and wished that at last she would be saved, but there was never a person to do that for her. Instead she tasted of many people's tears, and walked in shadows, because she was never called upon to do anything but give, and her name was created as sacrifice.

How intimately acquainted she was with the depths of human sorrow, and the unhappiness that welled within; she swam within these waters since the time she was born, and could never free herself of them. What existed was a world that was cruel, into which God had placed her, and a task that was impossible, except that she had shouldered it. There was no one else who could inflict such torture upon her, but she was made of steel; she was made of a substance that was unbreakable, and so she learned to give, and to give, and to give...

Please God, that I might live before you, and your servant should one day know no more pain.