Light Breaks Water

Light Breaks Water:

The first time I realized light could break water, I was seven years old, standing barefoot at the edge of a lake I couldn’t name. My mother was somewhere behind me, calling out not to go too far. The sun was setting low, dipping its orange belly into the horizon, and as it scattered its dying light across the rippling surface, it fractured — like glass. It danced, scattered, shimmered in pieces, as though the water itself had caught fire.

I remember thinking, That’s what it feels like when things break. Beautiful, but strange.

I’ve carried that image with me ever since. Through every season of my life, through love lost and found, through moments when I thought I might drown in my own grief, and those fleeting times when joy seemed to swell in my chest so large I could hardly breathe. Light breaking water. Beauty in fracture.

It would be years before I understood what it meant to really break.

I was twenty-three when my father died. It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a slow undoing. A string of unspoken apologies between us, a lifetime of things we both left unsaid. In the weeks after, people brought flowers and casseroles, and spoke to me in that hushed, too-careful way reserved for the newly grieving. I remember standing alone at the wake, staring at the surface of a glass of water on the windowsill, the sunlight catching it just so — and there it was again. Light breaking water.

For the first time, I realized it wasn’t about the light or the water. It was about the surface where they met. The thin line where grief meets memory, where love meets loss, where who we were meets who we must become.

As I grew older, that line seemed to follow me everywhere. In the hushed quiet of my first apartment, in the laughter of friends I would one day lose touch with, in the stillness after goodbyes I never thought I’d have to say.

At twenty-nine, I fell in love with a girl who loved books more than people, who collected old postcards from places she’d never been, who would stop mid-sentence if the sunlight hit the room a certain way. She used to say, “Do you see it? The way the light changes everything?”

I did.

We lasted two years. Not because we stopped loving each other, but because sometimes, light breaks water. It’s nobody’s fault. The surface just can’t hold forever.

I don’t tell these stories to make people sad. I tell them because I believe in small moments. In images that stay long after the people attached to them are gone. I believe in the way light breaks water — not just as a beautiful trick of nature, but as a reminder of resilience. Of transformation. Of the impossibility of permanence.

There’s a kind of bravery in knowing everything you love will change and loving it anyway.

Last summer, I returned to that same nameless lake. It had been decades since I stood at its shore. My mother was gone, the house we rented torn down, replaced by something shinier and emptier. The world had rearranged itself around me.

But the lake was still there.

I watched the light ripple across its surface, breaking, dancing, bending. And for the first time in years, I felt at peace. Because I finally understood — the light never disappears. It only changes form.

The people you lose, the hearts you break, the versions of yourself you shed like old skin — they don’t vanish. They refract. They ripple outwards. They bend into new shapes, find new homes in the corners of your heart you didn’t know existed.

And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch a glimpse of them sometimes. In the flicker of a candle. In the way someone laughs. In the soft hush of water at dusk.

This is what it means to be alive.

To let yourself be fractured. To let the light in. To keep loving, keep hoping, keep breaking the surface again and again. Because every time you do, you create something new. A different kind of beautiful. A different kind of whole.

And somewhere in that endless reflection, you find yourself.