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The mere word “Eyeglasses” sounds almost painfully ordinary, but I felt that it might make a terrific piece. Humans invented two little pieces of glass in order to correct vision, then spent centuries pretending eyeglasses also reveal intelligence, character, a bit of eccentricity and, occasionally, whether someone is a serial killer in some movie. The more I wrote down thoughts I kept thinking that I’d take this topic somewhere darker, kind of a boundary between what we honestly see and what is actually there. A mix of October eerie, a bit reflective and slightly supernatural.

I ventured off to write about how glasses remember, like when an old pair is found in a drawer, perhaps belonging to someone long gone. When they’re put on, you don’t see more clearly, you see what they once saw. In addition, glasses normally correct blurred vision but, when reversed, things are visible only when the world is out of focus. Think about how we spend our lives believing that seeing clearly means understanding clearly but, it does not. Eyeglasses can certainly sharpen words on a page, or an image in a photograph, but they cannot help us recognize deception, love, regret, opportunity, or the moment something, or someone, important is disappearing from our lives.

I’ve always thought there was something slightly supernatural about eyeglasses. Tucked into a frame, glasses sit between us and the world, and suddenly everything changes. Edges sharpen. Faces emerge. Words become readable. We call that corrected vision, as though seeing clearly were merely a matter of prescription.

If only.

There are things I have seen perfectly and failed to understand. Things I misunderstood because I saw only what I expected to see. And things I recognize now that were invisible to me when they were standing directly in front of my face.

I’ve thought that maybe October is the right month to wonder about such things. Shadows lengthen. Mirrors become slightly less trustworthy. The dead seem a little closer. And an old pair of eyeglasses sitting alone on a table can begin to look less like an object and more like a witness.

I keep thinking about circling back to the glasses themselves and realizing that, perhaps the most frightening things in life were never the things hiding in the dark. They were the things we looked directly at, in perfect focus, and still failed to see. It seems that, in October, we humans apparently require an entire month to admit that shadows, and what might lurk beyond, are interesting. It’s all about vision versus perception where two people can look through perfectly corrected lenses at exactly the same thing and see entirely different realities. People often fail to think outside the box, instead, they forget there was a box in the first place as they look through the glass, darkly.

What if our eyes aren’t the things that need correcting?

From the Writer’s Workshop: Write a post inspired by the word eyeglasses.