Chapter 2
Episode 2. Imposible to control somebody
Never .never.never.you xan try sicisl kodecs.but its not real to tel jerk i am not you spitit of duft kanibal.kas yra seniunas nuejas msn istatyme privatume offf
In the summer I turned nine, my grandmother gave me a terrarium—a glass sphere sealed with a cork, inside which a miniature world of moss and ferns breathed its own damp air. She said, “Look, you can watch it grow without ever touching it.” But I wanted to touch. I wanted to press my finger against the glass and feel the cold sweat of condensation, to lift the cork and let the smell of wet earth escape into my room. She told me not to. She said if I opened it, the whole system would die.
I opened it anyway.
The moss turned brown within a week. The ferns wilted into brittle skeletons. I cried and cried, but what I remember most is the strange freedom of having broken the seal—the way the warm, stale air of the room rushed in and mixed with that tiny, perfect climate. It was the first time I understood that some things cannot be controlled by love or by rules. That the world, even a world the size of my palm, has its own will.
That lesson returned to me years later, in a different kind of glass cage.
He was handsome in the way that wounds are handsome—sharp and inevitable. He told me how to dress, how to speak, how to laugh so that my laugh didn’t sound like a witch’s cackle. “You’re too loud,” he said. “You’re too much. You need to be softer, smaller, easier to hold.” I tried. I tried the way my grandmother tried to keep the terrarium sealed. I tightened my jaw, swallowed my opinions, let him pick the movies and the restaurants and the friends we kept. I became a green so pale it was almost white.
But you cannot turn a person into a place you own. The more he squeezed, the more I felt the pressure building inside my own sealed globe. One night, after he called me a jerk for laughing too hard at a joke that wasn’t his, I felt something snap in my chest—not a break, but a release. I looked at him and saw, for the first time, that his need to control me was not a sign of love but a confession of his own emptiness. He was not my spirit. He was not my code. He was just a man who had learned to pretend that tightening his fist was the same as holding on.
I walked out. Left the terrarium of that relationship open and empty on the table. He called after me—something about privacy, about the rules I had broken. But I was already gone, and the air outside was not stale at all. It smelled like rain and cut grass and the impossible green of things that refuse to be owned.
Never again, I thought. Never.never.never will I let someone seal me in a world of their making. You can try every code, every lock, every system of control—but it’s not real. It’s not even a story. It’s just a ghost trying to eat the living. And I am not your spirit. I am not your fuel. I am the one who walks out, leaves the glass behind, and breathes the open air.