Category: Random Thoughts

I have a theory about glass.

Not the kind that shatters, but the kind that waits.
Windows, screens, lenses.
Surfaces that pretend to separate us from the world but only thinly.
They don’t really divide anything; they just slow light down long enough for us to mistake reflection for distance.

I’ve been staring at my window a lot lately. From the right angle, I can see both the street outside and the room behind me, layered like two versions of reality trying to coexist.
If I move slightly, one fades and the other takes over. Sometimes I think that’s all consciousness is.

They often ask if schizophrenia feels like breaking.
It doesn’t.
It feels like transparency gone wrong. Like the glass itself starts remembering every image it ever reflected.
All the moments overlap. The world doesn’t fracture; it accumulates.

I have this dream. I drop a beaker in the lab.
It doesn’t explode the way you expect glass to. It just cracks cleanly, in silence. I remember how the fracture line looks like lightning trapped mid-air, as if something had been caught trying to escape.
My lab partner says, “Don’t touch it, you’ll cut yourself.”
But I am already holding one half in my palm, watching how it still managed to reflect my face, only twice now, separated by a thin edge of absence.

I don’t feel the cut at first. The blood comes quietly, like condensation.
And I think: this is what thought looks like when it breaks… still reflective, still capable of image, but no longer whole enough to trust.

I always think of that dream and I keep replaying the sound the glass didn’t make.
There’s something eerie about silent fractures.

Anyway, this summer, I was in the lab, trying to carry out an experiment on Photoluminescence. The supervisor walked past, asked if I had measured the spectra of the second unknown sample.
I said yes, though I hadn’t. The data didn’t make sense; light was behaving too politely for the chaos of my head that day.
He leaned over the table, looked through the lens, and said, “You know, even when glass looks clear, it’s still absorbing something.”
That stayed with me.
Maybe minds are like that too. They pass most things through but absorb just enough to tint everything after. You can spend years pretending transparency, but the color of what you’ve carried shows sooner or later.

There was a student once, someone I met at the cafeteria. He told me he could always tell when the world was “slightly off,” like when you pick up a cup that’s heavier than you expected.
We talked about gravitational lensing. How the path of light bends when it travels near a heavenly body, how truth bends too. He said he sometimes looked into mirrors and felt delayed, as if his reflection were thinking before him. I told him I knew that feeling.

He laughed and said, “So you’re one of us.”
I didn’t ask what us meant. Sometimes belonging doesn’t need to be defined, only recognized.

He also told me that old mirrors were made of silver, and over time they tarnish from the edges, slowly devouring their own reflection.
Maybe minds work the same way.
They oxidize from within; memories reacting with air, turning dark at the corners. You can still see through them, but not clearly. There’s always a shadow of what used to be.

Some days I try to catalogue the distortions. But there’s a danger in measuring too much; sooner or later, the observation becomes participation. You start altering what you’re observing just by existing near it.

People think clarity is the goal… to see things as they are. But maybe clarity is just another illusion, another kind of blindness we romanticize because it promises simplicity. Real vision, the kind that hurts, is when the glass disappears and you realize there was never a wall at all.

There’s a quiet violence in seeing too clearly. When you can no longer mistake reflections for reality, every surface feels thinner. You start noticing the fine cracks in everything.

I used to think that if I could name the cracks, I could fix them. That if I understood their geometry, their stress lines, their angle of impact, I could reverse the break.

The thing about living with this mind is that you begin to hear frequencies no one else does. Not literal sound, though sometimes that too, but tones of meaning.
Every word someone says carries a hum, a vibration possibly.
I keep listening for what hides beneath what’s said. It’s exhausting, but it feels honest.

There was M.

For a while, she was the clearest surface I knew. Everything reflected cleanly in her. We spoke in long sentences that felt like experiments: hypothesis, response, correction. I kept thinking if I explained myself precisely enough, she’d see me. But clarity has a cost. The closer we got, the more our images overlapped, until neither of us could tell whose light was whose.

She said I was “too transparent,” that she could see through me.
I thought it was a compliment until I realized she wasn’t looking at me anymore, just through.
Every time I tried to hold shape, I felt the temperature drop a little, like a window fogging from the inside.

M had a way of convincing me that my reflection was inaccurate, that her version of me was the real one.
And for a while, I believed her.
It’s easy to mistake someone else’s gaze for light when you’ve been standing in the dark too long.

When she left, I remember touching the spot on my wrist where her hand had been, as if glass could still remember fingerprints.
It does, in a way.

When it ended, it wasn’t an explosion. More like annealing. A slow cooling that leaves stress frozen inside the glass.
Sometimes I think we weren’t in love as much as we were caught in a feedback loop, each trying to correct the other’s distortion, each making the image worse.

And there was also S.

She never liked glass. She said it was too honest, that it never softened what it saw. She used to tilt mirrors slightly, as if a few degrees of imperfection made reflection kinder.
I didn’t understand it then.
I do now.

She had this way of speaking… like each sentence was a piece of stained glass, colors fitted together by care rather than symmetry. You could see the cracks, but they caught light instead of hiding it. Her laughter was transparent too, but in a warmer spectrum. It wasn’t the brittle kind that breaks silence; it filled it, reshaped it, made it breathable.

I think she was the first person who taught me that not every surface has to reflect; some can receive. With her, I didn’t feel the need to explain my own refractions. She saw them and didn’t try to correct the image. It’s strange, how that kind of gentleness can feel both eternal and brief at once.

When I write about her, I think of the way certain mornings still hold her shape in the light. Sometimes I catch myself arranging sentences the way she used to arrange her thoughts. Slowly, deliberately, with a kind of mercy toward whatever couldn’t be fixed.

Sometimes I wish what she wished to come true. That we were never perturbed and lived happily ever after. But that is not what we got. According to her, she was bad at life, and I was terrible at my beauty. She used to say it half-smiling, as if the confession itself was a joke neither of us wanted to end.

What she meant, I think, was that she could never stay long in the smooth version of the world, and I could never see myself without distortion. We were both made of refraction. She bent toward compassion, I bent toward doubt.