Prologue
"The only difference between you and a lump of clay is a word." - The Book Thief
People have a tendency to be afraid of taking risks. It's understandable, of course – risky pathways can be dangerous, and maybe some things are simply better left alone. One can never tell where a broken heart might lie in wait, after all. Perhaps it's wiser not to chance the weight of disappointment or heartbreak. But in our unwillingness to thrust our emotional stability into jeopardy, we often end up avoiding the important things in life.
Living is the little bits and pieces, much too minute to see. Often times, the most important things are the hardest to catch hold of. Good things come so slowly, and it seems that they leave so fast. Yet, in truth, they've been there all this seemingly infinite while, waiting for us, biding their time. They are love and truth and breaking hearts; all the shattered fragments hidden in our eyes. We conceal our emotions from ourselves, try to shelter every last shard of being from the person who knows us best.
Everyone fabricates their own disguise; we need them, it seems, in order to startle people. Because that's what we do; we startle people. We sneak up behind them, creeping about in the shadows until we're sure that we have them convinced that we are not there. It's a sort of game we play, a tiptoeing around the things that scare us most, and yet we all know how the song goes. The hidden know that they're being sought out, and the seeker is aware of such. So why do we continue to play?
Perhaps it's our way of passing the time until we come to accept the things that are meant to be. It's a challenge and an acceptance, and somehow we manage to despise the idea of either end of the spectrum. What sort of fragile creatures are we, that we cannot bear the strain of knowing? Yet in our reluctance to know things, we grow impatient with our own ignorance. People often cannot bear to simply wait for all of the tiny, forgotten slivers of particles to fall into place. And in that impatience, the awareness of our own restlessness slowly starts to drives us insane.
So we break free, screaming, from the little spaces in our own minds that hold us captive, and we risk things in order to feel something, to know that something else exists. It all goes comes back to the beginning of the circle, doesn't it? People just can't seem to restrain themselves from exploring that which intrigues them, no matter how dangerous it may be.
Maybe that was why, even though she knew in the back of her mind how indescribably precarious the ground she was choosing to walk on was, Santana just couldn't help but wonder.
Wonder, stumble, shatter, and maybe, just maybe, fall in love.