It drops to the floor and breaks into a million different pieces, sending sharp shards of glass in all directions. The once perfect illusion becoming somehow penetrable in the matter of seconds as she falls to her knees, staring at all the broken fragments, seeing their uneven edges and wonders how she will ever be able to put it all back together again. She knows all too well that some things can never be fixed, no matter how hard you tried, no matter how much glue you used. The cracks were always going to be there, waiting for the next tiniest breath of air to shatter it all over again. The prism of her life scatters across her kitchen floor, reflecting lights and spilling forth color onto her tiles.

In her dreams, it is different. There she is complete, almost perfectly round with no edges to cut him on. Though he doesn't mind the edges, never has. Doesn't handle her with kiddie gloves or sandpaper, instead clings to her with an air of desperation and ignores all the cuts and tears of his skin as it meets her razor sharp edges, doesn't mind the stain of blood. She admires him for that.

She wishes she was ovaled or circled; a shape with smoothed down corners, something he could hold onto without getting splitters in his callouses. But she consists of air and broken bits of shell and held together with string. One false move and she would be gone with the wind.

She has her secrets that she keeps in the locket that she wears around her neck. It's gold and fits perfectly in the cove of her collarbone. She never takes it off, because if she did, she may forget and forgetting, even for a moment, could lead to dreaming of things she had no business in dreaming about.

He is like her. He has his walls and his ball and chain that latches around his ankle. Sometimes she searches for the key, envisions him running freely. It's so vivid in her mind that she can almost see the muscles in his back as they clench and unwind and move against the fabric of his shirt.

But it's different now. Everything is so messy and complicated, smeared with the dirt of her betrayal. He walks hunched over, slouched back and shoulders lowered; the place between his shoulder blades where her knife went. The one she continued to twist when she sided with Mark over him. He was stained red that day and no matter how much pressure she applied to the open wound that she had inflicted, the bleeding wouldn't stop. He didn't even complain; content to bleed for her.

So she patched it up with a band aid and hoped in time it would heal. That he wouldn't have to lose a limb, only to realize that the only appendage that needed to be cut from him was her, if she wanted him to survive at all.

So she got out the hatchet and cut herself from him, sliced at her own flesh, but left him her heart. She thought he would be better for it, thought she would be too. But their wounds became infected, blistered and oozed, even after she packed it with salt. It was no use, the damage was done. She was to blame of course, she had done this. She had broken them. And they had died a slow agonizing death.

And now all the pieces of the broken picture frame scatter across her floor, and she presses her hands into the glass and winces briefly and lifts the picture out of its confinement, careful to not get blood on it. Maybe, if she were lucky, she would be reborn and he would too and they could have another chance at getting it right. But until then, her life is merely a prism reflecting lights and colors and all the things she did wrong.