Glassy thinking

My sister Gillian thinks in glass. I don't know how she learned to do such a thing. It is a mystery to me that she can think in glass, that Owen can think in sound, that Bruce can think in words, that Crystal can think in dance. These things are inconceivable to me, and I take such great pleasure from them.

Glass is most... I was going to say it's unusual, but in fact it is nothing more than a very accessable form of a very common substance, sand. It is colored by the addition of various elements. Gillian can tell you what they are, but I'm thinking cobalt for blue, copper for green, gold (I think) for red. It takes the breath away.

Beyond the science of it is the magic of it. Gillian's right brain formulates some sort of vision of something, god knows what. She uses her left brain to work out what glass to put where, what colors will transform into what light, what light will transform into what beauty, what beauty will make the heart sing. And she puts it together, exposes it to tremendous heat and it works.

That's about the weirdest thing I can imagine. Who worked that out? How did she? She's my older sister, made her living as an avionics engineer, raised a passel of kids, loved me because that was her nature.

We went to a strange boarding school together when she was about 13, me about 11. In London, SW something-or-other. It was a horrible school. The Latin mistress was a predatory lesbian who spent too much time in the girls' dorm, the English master a predatory creep who spent more time with me than was good for me. The boy's dorm-master was a strange and sadistic man, and Gillian's room-mate howled at the moon, no kidding, for real, for hours and hours. It was there that Gillian and I became friends, working our way together through some very, very strange growing-up experiences. Neither of us emerged entirely unscathed, but we emerged together, alive together.

Like fused glass, elemental but changed, hardened in some ways but still brittle and vulnerable in others. Now she lives in Mexico and thinks in glass. She is amazing, quite beyond my ken. I wonder if we are one as we used to be or if time has, in fact, separated the elements.