The Cracks Between The Glass

I have a problem with dust. It circulates in the air that I breathe, it coats itself on the devices and tools I use every day, and it makes me miserable due to allergies. I am the source of the problem. 70-80% of the dust in a house can be your own dead skin. Disbarred from your body, it floats around in the atmosphere, hovering as a ghost, until it finds a home where you never look.

Perhaps dust wouldn’t bother me if I could not see it. Out of sight, out of mind. The swirling vortexes that flutter about in afternoon sunlight would pass unnoticed, staying out of my perception. Life is full of dust. Things that swirl in and out of vision at a whim. Some people can’t see it. They’re vision poor, or maybe they have better things to look at. I don’t. I just see dust, swirling around in my life every moment of the day.

Where dust bothers me the most is on my phone. The very thing that I use the most every day. It’s always in my pocket, in my hand, or within reach. It’s become so instrumental in living that it could almost be considered necessary. The dust settles down into the crack between my screen and the bezel. It rests on the glass and around each button, it sticks out and pricks my mind. I’ve spent hours trying to remove it from the cracks, but it never goes away. It just regresses, deeper into the cracks between the glass. I can’t see it, but I know that it’s there.

Dust – no matter how hard you try to get rid of it, will always remain. Culture is full of it. We live in a world that has been sweeping it’s dust under a rug for too long. We know it’s there, and when the light falls just right on it, we can even see it straight on; but if you don’t look hard enough, or if your vision is blurred, you can almost forget about it. You can forget about it until you’re forced to see it. When you step on the rug and a cloud is launched up into the atmosphere, you know about it. You know about it, and you think to clean it… until it settles and you forget about it.

Perhaps it’s time that we lift the rug and start cleaning. Not all of it at once, we’d never clean up the whole mess. Maybe just little bits. Maybe if we all focus on one issue. We discuss where to put the dust, how to clean it up, and we focus on it; we focus on not forgetting it. Maybe then we can clean it up?

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