Glasses

Sarah was just about to pour herself a glass of water when she noticed the pair of glasses left unfolded on the kitchen table. There was nothing unusual about that; both her parents wore glasses, and her mum had an annoying tendency of leaving them absentmindedly about the house and then asking Sarah or her brother to find them for her at the most inconvenient of times. Normally, she would have just ignored them, but today something seemed off. She moved closer towards the table to get a better look.

They were brown-framed round-rimmed glasses that had a thick layer of dust coating both sides of each lens. Clearly they hadn’t been worn in a very long time. She was fairly certain that they weren’t her mum’s; she had never seen her mum in round-rimmed glasses. Yet these glasses looked remarkably familiar. Perhaps her dad’s then, although his eyesight was so bad that she’d never seen him take his glasses off during the day (except perhaps to go swimming, but he seldom did that either), and he certainly would never have left them unattended long enough to gather such a thick layer of dust.

Although these could just have been a really old pair of his. She did recall him once owning a pair of round-rimmed glasses almost a decade ago. She’d liked them at the time because she’d thought they made him look like Harry Potter, and to eight-year-old Sarah, this was very cool. She smiled to herself as she remembered how obsessed she’d been with them, always begging and pleading for him to let her try them on just once. On the occasions when he did, she would see the world around her go all fuzzy around the edges and giggle hysterically at how weird it felt. How simple her life was back then! No exams nor homework, no friendship drama, no worrying about getting into a good sixth form. 

These days it felt like her entire life was just one big ball of stress. She wished she could just forget it all and go back, just for a moment. Away from all the bullshit. She sat at the table and pondered this for a moment, absentmindedly reaching towards the glasses and running her fingers over the dusty lenses. Then she picked them up, wiped them clean with her shirt, and put them on, waiting for the familiar fuzziness to surround her. It didn’t. Instead, everything suddenly appeared sharper, more focused. She felt like she was looking through a car window on a rainy day and the windscreen wipers had just started working. 

For a moment she just stood there, staring at the slightly messy kitchen. The fridge covered in souvenir magnets and reminder notes, the half-loaded dishwasher, the single droplet of water hanging from the tap. Boring things she’d never paid much mind to before, but right now they all seemed so dazzlingly beautiful. Then a strange sadness came over her. How long had it been since she’d been able to see things so clearly? And why had she never noticed that she couldn’t?

‘Well’, she thought to herself, ‘I guess that’s just how life is sometimes’. Then she took them off and poured herself a glass of water.