Tea flare

I am sitting upstairs, transferring my notes from Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. Summer is approaching and the morning sun is shining into the room. The days have been so gray for a long time. Today, I am happy to sit in the sun. I brewed myself some Turkish tea, put it on the black center table and I noticed an intense flare coming from the corner of the glass. It is a thin-bellied Turkish tea glass. Slightly larger than standard.

The lens flare immediately captured my attention. It has these tea-colored hues; golden yellow and bronze at the center, with the greatest intensity concentrated within a radius of about five millimeters. Depending on my angle, the colors shift from red to yellow with gold, brown and orange in between.

I can discern the strands of light, scattering in every direction from this central area. Some strands extend all the way from the center, others begin and end in the midsection. The strands are yellowish towards the center and reddish on the outer edges. There is also a rainbow-like shimmer from the middle outward, composed of red, orange, yellow, and even a trace of green. The strands do not originate from a single point; rather, they seem to emerge from anywhere within that small radius, which makes them appear to diverge in different directions.

If I stare at the glass from a particular angle, the flare begins to radiate both inward and outward—drawn in from the bottom, pushed out from the top. Perhaps the heat of the tea is making it swirl, producing this animated radiation.

I tried to take a photo, but I couldn't reproduce the same flare. It must be a phenomenon of the eye's optics and does not appear to be as magical through the lens of my camera.

I tried to draw it, but I don't have the patience.

I chose to write about it instead.