Lea Michele- Mama Who Bore Me (Spring Awakening original cast recording)

There was a heavy click as the door swung shut behind him. After a few moments the sound of his entourage departing scraped the vacant air, roaring like distant thunder. A hollow silence wafted through the room—the dead-looking, untouchable exhibits neatly packed in their glass cases, the pristinely polished tile floors, the sterile white walls, and her.

For others, Domino Museum might have held a strange glamour—the possibility of uncovering the secrets of unknown worlds, seeing through the eyes of the dead. The mysteries drew people in, begging them to place themselves in a larger context, to rethink the importance of their own lives. For Isis, the museum held no such mythical magnetism. She had been born and raised in a total self-immersion, unquestionably authentic ancient history museum, and the only thing that puzzled her when she wandered the halls of Domino Museum was not the ancient wisdom but the fact that everything was kept locked up in high-sensitivity glass and under near-constant supervision.

Ancient Egyptian plates and bowls: the placard under the case said they were worth millions, and they looked exactly the same as the sets of dishes she hadn't thought twice about breaking as a child. Under the gentle scrutiny of dim museum lighting were large stretches of painted and embossed stone that could have been easily removed from her childhood bedroom. Scholars employed by the museum made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year painstakingly translating a language she had practically known since birth.

'I should be in one of these glass cases…' she mused as she wandered the empty corridors. 'I wonder how much I would fetch at auction?' She let her fingers carelessly trail along the sparkling glass, leaving behind the heavy smudges of her fingerprints like smog infringing on a clear sky. In her mind's eye she could envision it perfectly: Sitting delicately on a pedestal as the paddles shot up, the auctioneer's voice becoming increasingly excited as the price rose higher and higher…

She stopped and leaned against the wall, the imposing tablet from the pharaoh's tomb encompassing her vision. For years that stone had sat in Egypt, carefully preserved in climate-sensitive chambers and never seeing the light of day. It had been worth nothing more than the time of energy than the people charged with maintaining it. And now, after undergoing no visible physical transformation, merely shipped across a sea and hung on a wall, it had instantly been restored to its proper importance, its proper place in the incomprehensible game of destiny.

In a wild wave of desire, she longed to run her fingers across its rough, crumbling surface. She hovered like a ghost, mere millimeters from its sculpted surface, imagining that they breathed the same air and shared a similar heartbeat.

She could touch it, lay her palm upon it, and no one would ever know.

And yet, she couldn't bear to touch it, to see its centuries-old dust caked on her fingers. To touch it would be to acknowledge that it was real—it would be like touching a fairy or a unicorn—physical confirmation that she wasn't wandering the corridors of a fantastical dream land. The idea was both too horrific and too entrancing to even consider.

Her fingers still stung from where he had snatched the card away—lacking in common courtesy, that one was. Obelisk the Tormenter, to them both it was everything that they ever needed. It was his chance to reclaim his international throne, to see the world bow to his precisely-polished, leather clad feet. But she couldn't help but smile wryly when she thought of the flames that had ignited in his eyes when he had taken it from her. Because, no matter how much he thought it was worth, to her it was priceless.

That card was the eyes of her little brother when he had begged her to tell him a story about ancient Egypt. It was the beauty of the rituals that she used to believe in. It was the power her last name still instilled on the locals, though few—if any—remembered why. That card was her one chance to see everything that had been turned sideways be put right-side up. It was her chance to reel in her wayward brother like she could nothing else. And she had held it in her hands, not fully realizing how important it really was until it had been imprudently snatched from her.

Without realizing it, or without caring to stop it, she inched progressively closer to the imposing glass that sealed the pharaoh's stone away from the rest of the world. It was an innocent artifact, dragged from the shadows of the past and hung before the gapping, glaring eyes of the present. It wore its vulnerability like the pharaohs wore their jewels because it was the only thing it could give. The only thing it had left.

She watched as her reflection swirled like a whirlpool in the glass, transfixed by her own revolving image. She saw her eyes turn a deceptively familiar shade of pale lavender, a color that light and goodness seemed to emanate from. The glass glowed in a thousand different colors. It could be the soft summer sky, sweet sandy beaches, or those warm, iridescent eyes that always made her feel like something was blooming inside her.

She didn't realize how close the palm of her hand came to the pane of glass. She knew only that she wanted to touch it as those eyes had touched her. The light that reflected off the pane of glass consumed her, while the outside world unraveled around her. The walls were dark, the corners of the rooms where the shadows pooled threatened to consume her if she wasn't careful. The tiles of the floor gleamed like sharply polished teeth, and the ceiling loomed down on her like a condescending glower. But she clung onto the glass, pushing harder and harder at the one thing that had some semblance of familiarity.

If only he had never left. If only he had never discovered motorcycles whose engines sounded like death, heavy gold blades that felt like freedom and tasted like glory. If only he hadn't longed so strongly for the wind and the golden rays of sunshine. If only he had discovered liberation before no one had taught it to him. If only there had never been a pharaoh at all.

She melted to the ground like a waterfall, feeling like a puzzle whose pieces had been scattered across the continents, out of reach and out of sight. She had felt a compulsion, for as long as she could remember, to put all the pieces back together. And what had she done instead—let them all slip through her fingers like tiny grains of sand and watched without blinking an eye as they were scattered by the winds.

She felt her vision darken as shadows in the form of perfectly carved eyes and elaborate inscriptions speckled her sight like an infection. But she refused to let her fingers part from the fleshy glass that separated her from the stone, from all the other children her age, from the anger in her brother that she could never understand, from the people who walked with high heads—knowing that their mistakes were inconsequential and destiny was unimportant—that separated her from her brother now, that separated her from having any hope of being able to solve any of it by herself.

The next morning, the early-morning janitorial staff at the Domino Museum was surprised to see the floor of the ancient Egyptian exhibit scattered with shards of broken glass that glittered in the early morning light like thousands of tiny, sun-splattered stars. They swept the pieces up, jumbled their order beyond all recognition or repair. Had they had the time or the patience, they would have seen that the pieces, when properly assembled, formed a neat and coherent whole, despite how scattered the individual shards had fallen.

I think this my least favorite one so far, it just seems so blunt :/ Not to mention that the chapters are getting increasingly shorter XD