"I just don't want to see you get hurt," he said.

"Hurt?" I thought, but actually said aloud. What part of this story felt vulnerable? I felt pretty good about my mastery of the situation. I felt I had it under control.

"I mean, you're fragile..." his words stopped me dead in my trains of thought.

"Fragile...Fragile?" Very quickly I also thought/said as if rolling the word in my hand like a ball, exploring its density and coolness.

"I'm not fragile," I defended.

"Yes...you are. I see it in your eyes."

And just like that he had me. He saw me, much younger, much more innocent. And I was forced to see me too.

A girl feels fragile and perfect and pretty when she first discovers love; love hidden under the slate grey rocks of adolescence- love that flares out- a burst of light into dark space.

A girl is a delicate bone china teacup, a tasse of fine-fired glass until the first break. She is never the same. The handle needs to be re-glued (and to necessitate the mar of glue at all!), it doesn't exactly sit the way it did before in the saucer, somehow it seems a little more accident prone. So she builds and thickens. Perhaps becoming a mug. Perhaps a thick and plated stein. She must protect herself from more breakage so she one day discovers she is made of platinum. Safe, Strong, Secure...but no longer fragile.

After much thought, much silence, many watercolored memories flushing out the words,

"I don't remember the last time I felt fragile..."

And like Bella after Edward, I was never the same. I knew my task at once, my optimistic regression to become that fragile, that pure, once again.

To replace platinum with porcelain. And to sit on a saucer that will hold me tight against the threat of shattering.