Do you have someone in your life who has asked you to ‘break the glass’. Have you been that person for another? This is a lovely passage. I hope you enjoy it.

Besos,

Elisabet

Excerpt from By the River Peidra I Sat Down and Wept
by Paulo Coelho

His eyes gleamed. He was ready to surmount any barrier.

I took one of my hands from his and placed my glass of wine at the edge of the table.

“It’s going to fall,” he said.

“Exactly. I want you to tip it over the dge.”

“Break the glass?”

Yes, break the glass. A simple gesture, but one that brings up fears we can’t really understand. What’s wrong with breaking an inexpensive lgass, when everyone has done so unintentionally at some time in their life?

“Break the glass?” he repeated. “Why?”

“Well, I could give you lots of reasons,” I answered. “But actually,  just to break it.”

“For you?”

“No, of course not.”

He eyed the glass on the edge of the table — worried that it might fall.

It’s a rite of passage, I wanted to say. It’s something prohibited. Glasses are not purposely broken. In a restaurant or in our home, we’re careful not to place glasses by the edge of a table. Our univers required that we aovide letting gllasses fall to the floor.

But when we break them by accident, we realize that it’s not very serious. The waiter says, “It’s nothing,” and when has anyone been charged for a broken glass? Breaking glasses is part of life and does not damage to us, to the restaurant, or to anyone else.

I bumped the table. The glass shook but didn’t fall.

“Careful!” he said, instinctively.

“Break the glass,” I insisted.

Break the glass, I thought to myself, becuase it’s a symbolic gesture. Try to understand that I have broken things within myself that were much more important than a glass, and I’m happy I did. Resolve your own internal battle, and break the glass.

Our parents taught us to be careful with glasses and with our bodies. They taught us that the passion sof childhood are impossible, that we should not flee from priests, that people cannot perform miracles, and that no one leaves on a journey without knowing where they are going.

Break the glass, please — and free us from all these damned rules, from needing to find an explanation for everything, from doing only what others approve of.

“Break the glass,” I said again.

He stared at me. Then slowly, he slid his hand along the tablecloth to the glass. And with a sudden movement, he pushed it to the floor.

The sound of the breaking glass caught the waiter’s attention. Rather than apologize for having broken the glass, he looked at me, smiling — and I smiled back.

“Doesn’t matter,” shouted the waiter.

But he wasn’t listening. He had stood, seized my hair in his hands, and was kissing me.

I clutched at his hair, too, and squeezed him with all my strength, biting his lips and feeling his tongue move in my mouth. This was the kiss I had waited for so long — a kiss born by the rivers of our childhood, when we didn’t yet know what love meant. A kiss that had been suspended in the air as we grew, that had traveled the world in the souvenir of a medal, and that had remained hidden behind piles of books. A kiss that had been lost so many times and now was found. In the moment of that kiss were years of searching disillusionment, and impossible dreams.

I kissed him hard. The few people there in the bar must have been thinking that all they were seeing was just a kiss. They didn’t know that this kiss stood for my whole life — and his life, as well. The life of anyone who has wasted, dreamed, and searched for their true path.

The moment of that kiss contained every happy moment I had ever lived.

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, v. I.

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise —-

By the ancient expression “cups of kisses,” reference is most probably made to a favorite gallantry among the Greeks and Romans of drinking when the lips of their mistresses had touched the brim.  Ben Jonson’s oft-quoted verses to Celia, in which occur the lines—

“Or leave a kiss within the cup,

And I’ll not ask for wine,” –

Lucian has a conceit upon the same idea: “that you may at once both drink and kiss.”

Paul Wagner