moon-coloured glasses

People like to talk about rose-coloured glasses, as if that’s the only kind of distortion that matters. As if optimism is the most dangerous drug. The sweet little delusion, the blur of affection that makes everything look kinder. You love, so you overlook. You believe, so you don’t question. Red flags turn pastel. You’re naive, and you’re hopeful.

But one day, it comes off. Eventually, after the heartbreak, something shifts. The world turns cooler. Dimmer. Complicated.

Same frames, different tint.

I wear moon-coloured glasses.

They don’t make everything prettier-- they make them poetic. Symbolic. Strange. They overcomplicate. It’s not that I don’t see clearly, I just simply see too many versions: through them, around them, back into their origin, forward into their consequences. Suddenly there are three meanings instead of one, shadows where there should be outlines. They refract the truth. Optimism turns into recursion. Everything feels like subtext.

It’s not confusion I feel. It’s excess.

A kind of recursive knowing. As if nothing can be looked at directly-- only interpreted, then reinterpreted, then again. As if clarity is too blunt a tool for the texture of reality. These lenses fracture the obvious. They take one truth and stretch it into seven, each with its own logic, its own gravitational pull.

And I follow all of them.

Contradiction doesn’t threaten me. I rely on it. I expect it. A person can be kind and cruel in the same breath, and I won’t flinch. A decision can be both right and devastating. An ending can feel inevitable and undeserved. I don’t need things to make sense in a linear way-- I need them to feel honest in their mess. If anything, coherence makes me suspicious.

The moon doesn’t glow on its own. It reflects. That’s the trick of it. That’s the metaphor. Moonlight is secondhand. These glasses are too.

Through these lenses, everything is filtered, mediated. The text, not the conversation. The playlist, not the person. The memory, not the moment. It’s not detachment-- it’s over-connection. A thousand threads, a thousand meanings, to every word. A deeper form of attention.

But it comes at a cost.

I over-understand everyone. I can trace most behaviors back to their origin. I notice the defense mechanisms, the half-formed fears, the inherited patterns, the shadow of some long-ago tenderness that shaped it all. I can justify anything, if I sit with it long enough. I can forgive people for things they never apologized for-- just because I get it.

Which makes it hard to know what I stand for. Because if every reason makes sense, how do I stay firm in mine? If every action has context, where do I draw the line?

I agree with everyone out of pure understanding. I absorb their contradictions without needing them resolved. I accept their excuses as reflections of something real. But when it comes to me-- I hesitate. I blur. I unravel. If I can empathize with everyone, then who am I in opposition to? What principles hold, when every person is just a thousand justifiable threads tangled into one?

I can understand anything about anyone. Except myself. I treat other people’s complexity as sacred. I treat mine as a flaw in perception.

These glasses give me so much, and they take just as much away. I am under the curse of the moon and I do not know if I am human or werewolf.

But even then-- I can’t bring myself to take them off. Because they’ve changed the way I experience meaning. Or maybe they’ve made meaning possible at all. The ordinary becomes mythic. The past becomes literature. I don’t just remember events-- I remember their resonance. I don’t just process people-- I translate them. I don’t want a life that’s clean and self-evident. I want one I can interpret, endlessly.

The glasses let me do that. They make everything symbolic. Patterned. Poetic.

Not beautiful. Just charged. Even the painful moments shimmer with density, with a sense of narrative recursion. Even the worst experiences feel storied. They pulse with emotional architecture. They ache in a way that means something.

I don’t need closure, I need complexity. I don’t need to feel certain. I need to feel submerged. I don’t want clarity. I want poetry. I reject simplicity and crave significance.

I’d rather see too much than too little.

I’d rather make meaning than miss it.

And in the moonlight, even the contradictions glow.