The Weight of a Reflection

We spend our lives looking at the surface of things. We touch the glass, the water, the polished wood, expecting to find the world waiting on the other side. But the surface is a boundary. It holds what is real and gives us back only a ghost, a shimmer of light that mimics our own shape. In the long winter, when the ice thickens on the lake, the reflection becomes more solid than the air. It is a quiet deception. We reach for the warmth, but the light is trapped in the grain of the table, in the depth of the dark. We are always looking for something that is not there, or perhaps, something that is only there because we have decided to see it. The silence of the object is the loudest part of the room. Does the light know it is being watched, or is it simply waiting for the dark to return?

Avik Sengupta has taken this beautiful image titled Glowing Caterpillar. It finds the hidden life in the stillness of a surface. What do you see when you look past the light?