Refraction

Water remembers light differently than air does— bends it, holds it, lets it scatter into colors that were always there.

The small things know this. Fish navigate by the breaking point, the threshold where one medium gives way to another, where you can only see clearly if you're willing to be bent.

I watched a stone sink through clarity, watched how the path it took was never the straight line my eye insisted it should be.

Everything beautiful is a refraction— the way sorrow makes the ordinary luminous, how absence teaches the shape of presence, how we learn to see only by accepting we can't see straight.