I used to think people were like glass because glass is hard-shelled and crystal-clear and it shatters if you breathe wrong and most of us wear a tough outer layer to survive the bumps while guarding our fragile little egos and the light inside us beams outwards sometimes as a soft glow and sometimes as a flare and together those beams make a kind of kaleidoscope we call life. But lately I have been second-guessing that metaphor because maybe we are mirrors instead and what I thought was transparency was just reflection and my own thoughts looking back at me from someone else’s surface.

It is funny how confident we get about knowing what kind of person someone is as if we have earned X-ray vision by surviving our own past but a lot of the time we are just projecting and stacking our experiences into opinions and then mistaking those opinions for truth. We are all memers in the sense that we imitate and do what we see and that is how we have always moved forward by copying and remixing and repeating and mimicry is the scaffolding that let us build families and rituals and codes and countries. And still despite all that there is this relentless need to find someone who just gets me which is the contradiction that loops in my head because we are endlessly shaped by each other but we crave the rare human tuning fork that hums at our frequency.

Maybe the truth sits in the middle somewhere between glass and mirror and changing with the light like those one-way privacy panes that look opaque from the brighter side where flood someone with attention and judgment and suddenly they are a mirror and you only see yourself and turn down the outside glare and the same panel becomes a window with nothing essential changed except the conditions. I have noticed this in small ordinary moments when the world finally gets quiet late at night and I can actually hear myself think and that is when I am more glass and more see-through even to me and then drop a casual comment in a crowded thread and suddenly I am reflecting a thousand strangers’ moods.

Some days I am a window and some days I am a funhouse mirror and once in a while I am a stained-glass panel where whatever light gets through feels almost like grace but I am never pure and I guess that is the practice which is tweak the lighting and notice what turns me reflective and what makes me see-through and dim what drowns me out and brighten what brings me back and then step closer and look really look and maybe take a breath and change the angle and whatever I do I should find a way to look in without breaking anything.

Curious what you think, find me on Twitter. I am @troysk704.