I wasn’t expecting to find anything meaningful that afternoon. I was simply clearing out a cupboard — the kind of chore you put off until the guilt outweighs the dread. Inside, buried behind a stack of mismatched photo albums and yellowing documents, sat a small cardboard box. It looked unremarkable, the sort of container filled with bits that once had meaning but now existed only as clutter.
Yet when I opened it, something inside immediately caught my eye.
Thin, colorful objects glimmered faintly under the dusty bulb. At first glance, I assumed they were whimsical cocktail stirrers or old decorations from a forgotten holiday party. They were too odd — slender, shiny, almost playful — to be anything important.
But the moment I picked one up, I realized I was holding glass.
Glass, delicate and cool against my fingertips. Glass crafted with intention.
There were several of them, each a different color — amber orange, bright green, soft yellow. And each one had a tiny curved hook at the top. They were fragile, precise, and oddly poetic. Nothing about them suggested randomness.
So what exactly were they?
I stared at them for a long moment, a quiet suspicion forming, though I didn’t yet have the language for it.
All I knew was this: whatever they were, they didn’t belong in a forgotten box. They felt like a message from another time — and I couldn’t shake the urge to decode it.
