The Glass Between Us
The smell of rain on hot pavement always brings me back to the feeling of being behind a thick, cool windowpane. It is a strange, muffled sensation—the way the world hums with a vibration you cannot quite touch. There is a specific texture to silence when it is pressed against your skin, like the smooth, unyielding surface of a jar that keeps the air inside perfectly still. We spend so much of our lives trying to reach through that invisible barrier, pressing our palms against the glass, waiting for the warmth of another hand to meet ours. Sometimes, the body feels like a house with the curtains drawn, where the sounds of the street are just distant echoes of a life happening somewhere else. We are all searching for the seam in the wall, the place where the solid world softens enough to let us slip through. Does the heart ever truly stop knocking on the door of the outside world?
Zahraa Al Hassani has captured this quiet distance in her moving portrait titled I’m Imprisoned in Autism. The way the subject exists within his own space reminds me of that heavy, beautiful silence I know so well. Can you feel the weight of the air surrounding him?
