Through glass, less clearly

Friday Fragment #39

There are few intimate items that can hold my attention for as long as the smudged lenses – the dust, dirt and many myriad particles of detritus – of a fellow spectacles wearer. In many ways, glasses might be the most intimate of such items: connected or close to each of those organs through which the body experiences sensation, and worn specifically to correct or enhance one of those senses. An elderly friend once wore his with years’ worth of accumulated filth encrusted around the edge of each lens, pushed into the frame like the soil of autumn compacted against the gutter. Across the left and right glass: smeared and spotted, a million molecules of saliva and mucus, of sweat and grease, transported by both the familiar and the foreign, a fingerprint here and there, picked out in relief among the fat and the dirt. I take the pair from my own face now and, though ostensibly clean, look closely to observe all of that same equivalent life and history. An eyelash and a hair from the brow above hang lifelessly from one pane. | There’s a photo of a window I captured on Wednesday 8th of May, 2019. It was early in the morning, and the window was beaded with condensation – the very beautiful first thing I had noticed on waking up. The photo shows a darkened recess and a bright square of light behind the glass, half-revealing the green of the woodland that surrounded all sides of the hut in which I had slept, a verdure broken only by the cold white shards of a dawn sky. The day before, my six-hour-long commute had culminated in a taxi ride which dropped me to the edge of a large damp field in the middle of Suffolk. I’d been fiddling with a pair of headphones for all of the journey in the taxi, trying to stay connected to the live radio commentary of what I was convinced would be a ‘dead rubber’ football match. I’d been given instructions to reach my woodland hut: found the path, followed its wind, spotted the gate and then the house beyond, collected a key and then located my dwelling for the night at the far end of a woodland pitch. I took my bag from my shoulder and parked the case on the other side of the door, and then stood in the doorway, phone held aloft for the next 45 minutes or so, to maintain the most precious and coveted of cellular signals, and experience the best game of football I’d never seen. But I heard it: cacophony and chorus of joyous tribal delirium. The view of the window that morning was prepossessing not least because it denied me a clearer look at life outside of that cabin for a few extra moments. It rooted me secure behind that glass for longer, able to recall and sink back into the happiness of what had transpired the night before. I exhaled slowly with open mouth and watched a cumulus of breath travel and fade against the dark corner of the room. I was insulated from the cold of outside for a little while longer, back behind the recess, away from the declaratory green and white of the world’s next rotation, holding on for longer to a couple of glorious hours from its past. Water layered the glass: a signature of my ten or so hours in this room, microscopically: the beginnings of my portrait upon a form, within a place, set into time, like that first trace of sebum and solitary mote of dust that connects on the lens of the spectacles wearer.

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