First time i discovered that glass had an amorphous structure on a microscopic level, an infinitely disordered, messy arrangement of molecules, it was in my science class in grade 8 and i remember to have felt defrauded, even betrayed. It was a weirdly emotional moment. Glass was the most sacred thing to me before, a symbol of perfection, beauty and purity. It was hard to believe that it’s fabric, just like everybody and everything else, had it’s own unholy patches.

Growing up, as it happens with all the children, I started off with the imagination of a perfect world created in the image of a perfect god. Slowly and gradually, as the reality hit home, I realized that perfection or absolute divinity is rather a rare thing on Earth if it exists after all. I saw that my nicest class fellows cheated in exams, teachers were ignorant, parents were distant, things stood way inferior to their imaginable ideal selves. It was like ideals were bugs and my experience an efficient insecticide. As my ideals diminished with time, the greater was the force I held on to those left. Fast forward to grade 8 where glass was pretty much the last thing I was left with. Giving up on it would mean, giving up hope, if ever, of catching the reflection of God because if not in the glass mirror, where else could you catch it! Though I was too small to enunciate it back then but I knew it in my heart of hearts that it was religiously important for me to establish that glass was divine/beautiful in its own way.

So i looked closely into its molecular structure, surfed through the internet, downloading all the possible images that I could get my hands on of the striking, though still not ordered, molecular arrangements of the glass insides. I realized beauty does not have to be ordered. Perfection is not averse to messiness.

Life is probably hard for an honest, thinking man. As long as I hated glass, I broke my fair share of it and now that I love it, I feel bad for all the fragments I have left behind in my path. If that’s a sacrifice life calls for, I think i have paid my dues in full. If there is one take-away from this melodrama of glass, it’s that perfection is over-rated and idealism is unrealistic and needs reality to pivot on to make any sense. All things are beautiful in their own right. Absolutely nothing in this world is totally impure, and if you find one, check the lens you’re viewing the world with. That might just be the only dirty thing around.