Chapter 1

That same season, Lopas began to learn the rhythm of the loom. It was not a formal lesson; it was a quiet inheritance passed down in stolen afternoons. An old woman in the village—some called her a weaver, others simply called her the one who remembered—opened her home to the girl who appeared at her door with shy curiosity. The cottage smelled of wool and woodsmoke, and the loom sat by the window like a patient animal waiting to breathe. The woman’s hands moved without hesitation, threading the weft over the warp, creating patterns that Lopas could not yet name. She showed Lopas how to hold the shuttle, how to press the treadle with her foot, how to feel the tension in the threads. “You must be gentle,” the woman said once, her voice like the rustle of dried leaves. “The yarn remembers everything.” Lopas did not fully understand, but she nodded.

She wore the glasses whenever she could. At first only in her room, then during walks along the frozen path to the village, then even at the weaver’s cottage, though she removed them before entering, afraid the woman might laugh. The lenses turned the grey winter sky into a soft pinkish pearl. The bare branches of the birch trees seemed wrapped in gauze. Her own hands, chapped from the cold, looked almost pretty in that light. The world became a place she could bear, a place where the cracks were hidden by colour.

But the glasses were not the only thing that changed her sight. The loom taught her a different kind of vision. She learned to see the threads before they became cloth, to trace the patterns that lay hidden in the chaos of yarn. Each colour held a story: the blue was the sky of her grandfather’s country, the brown was the earth after rain, the red was the scarf her mother had worn the day she left. Lopas did not know why she associated these things; they simply appeared in her mind as she wove. The woman never asked her to explain. Sometimes she would look at Lopas’s work and nod, and that was enough.

One afternoon, when the snow melted into slush and the first hint of spring touched the air, the woman showed Lopas an old photograph. It was sepia, cracked at the edges, showing a group of women standing in front of a large loom. “My mother,” the woman said, pointing to a young face in the back row. “And her mother before her. We have been weaving for as long as anyone remembers.” Lopas touched the photograph with her fingertip. She wanted to ask about the other women, their names, their stories, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she asked, “Did they wear glasses?” The woman laughed, a quiet, surprised sound. “Some did. But not like yours.” Lopas felt her face warm. She had not realized the woman knew.

That evening, alone in her room, Lopas held the glasses in her palms and studied them. The tint was so faint it was almost invisible indoors, but outside it transformed everything. She put them on and looked out the window at the dim street. A man walked his dog, his silhouette slightly pink. A car passed, headlights like blurred roses. She wondered if everyone saw the world this way when they were happy, or if the glasses were a trick, a way to hide from something. The thought unsettled her. She took them off and the street became ordinary again, grey and sharp.

The weaver gave her a small piece of cloth that spring, a square of linen with a pattern of interlocking loops. “Keep it,” she said. “It is the first true thing you made.” Lopas folded it carefully and placed it in the cedar box next to the glasses. She did not know then that she would carry that cloth with her for years, that it would become a talisman, a reminder of the woman who had taught her that threads could hold more than fabric.

Summer came and Lopas spent long afternoons at the cottage, now without the glasses. She wanted to see the colours as they truly were. The weaver’s hands were slower now, but her eyes still sharp. She taught Lopas how to fix a broken thread, how to start a new pattern, how to finish a piece so the edges would not fray. “A good weaver leaves no loose ends,” she said. “But life is not a loom. Life has many loose ends. You learn to live with them.” Lopas listened and wove.

By autumn, the woman grew ill. Her daughter came from the city to care for her, and the cottage was closed. Lopas stood outside the door one last time, pressing her palm against the wood. She did not knock. She walked home through the fallen leaves, their colours bright and brittle without the glasses. She had stopped wearing them daily. They stayed in the box, next to the cloth.

Years later, when Lopas was grown and the weaver had long passed, she would take out the glasses and hold them up to the light. The tint had faded slightly, but the world still softened when she looked through them. She would remember the winter she first saw herself in the mirror through rose-coloured glass, and the loom that taught her that seeing was not the same as understanding. She would remember the woman who said yarn remembers everything. And she would wonder, as she always did, if the lenses were a shield or a door.

One cold evening in late December, Lopas sat alone in her apartment, the cedar box open on her lap. She had not woven in months. Her fingers itched for the shuttle, but something held her back. She picked up the cloth she had made as a child, the loops still perfect, the edges smooth. She pressed it to her cheek. Then she reached for the glasses and put them on. The room turned warm. The shadows on the walls became soft. She saw a crack in the glass—a hairline fracture near the bridge—and for a moment the world split into two: one rose, one sharp. She did not take them off. She sat there, holding the cloth, looking at the crack, and felt the first thread of a question she had never dared ask: what lay beyond the tint?