Bottled (The Kid Was Alright #3)

 It was just a glass bottle. There weren’t many like it; yet it was not the only one. Its life was insignificant, the lives of those who held it were not.

It was just a glass bottle. In another life, it might have held sugar and carbon, it might have heard laughter from the same mouths that drank from it. In this life, it held water and sea glass, and heard the voice of the boy who had filled it. If it had ears, it heard his footsteps on the shore, and then it heard her voice by the door. Until it heard nothing at all.

There weren’t many like it; yet it was not the only one. It was not special, not in the slightest. Not until it was the most special thing on earth, when nothing else was its equal. It became special the moment she saw it; it became special when their eyes beheld the enormity of color within it. The old colors of her dress, background to the new colors of the once ordinary glass bottle, now bursting with the lost pieces of shattered cups, sand, bones, and dreams that were trapped inside of it. If the bottle had eyes, it might have seen what they could not; their eyes examined the shards in the glass bottle, but not the glass on which they walked.

Its life was insignificant, the lives of those who held it were not. Their lives touched each other the way the tiny femur of a creature unknown touched the chip of brickwork within that fragile, yet all-encompassing glass bottle. Those hands, that traded and examined its beauty, were the same that gripped in control and pointed in blame. The bottle did not know its significance, it did not know why her hands trembled as she held it. It did not know that it contained false hope floating in the lake water, and lost causes beside the metal scraps.

It did not know that for a moment in time it connected two damaged souls in its tender creation and fragile beauty. That moment lives, just as the bottle does, at the bottom of the godforsaken lake that made it beautiful.