Aperture

The eye narrows to let the world in sharper— a small hole admits the whole sun, inverted and exact on the wall behind. We live always adjusting the aperture, widening when we hunger for sensation, closing when the glare becomes too honest. There's a moment between settings when nothing is clear, when the light spills through without shaping, and we see not the world but the passage itself— how brightness travels, how it bends around the edges we thought held it. The photograph doesn't capture what we saw. It captures what we allowed through, the careful frame of our not-wanting to see it all. But sometimes the aperture opens fully, and for a breath we stop pretending we're not being flooded by everything.