Refraction

Light breaks the surface like a promise— bent, scattered, shattered into parts that cannot find their way back whole.

Below, the world wears a different face. My hand reaches down and multiplies, two hands swimming toward each other, one true, one a ghost that cannot touch.

This is how we learn to doubt: through water's patient distortion, through seeing what might be if the light bent just this way, if we leaned closer to the edge.

The ripple passes. The image steadies. What was fractured settles into stone again, but something in the eye remains untethered— the memory of doubling, the ghost hand that almost held us.