The astigmatic test at a local Wal-Mart Vision Center

“Try to grab its wings” she said,

It was a beautiful dragonfly with two pairs of large transparent wings bearing bright red and yellow specks.

“This could not be real; unless small brownish notebook could nowadays give birth to an insect, this is just one of them fancy diagnostic tricks. I’m in college, lady” I thought,

But by an unknown impulse and a quick jerk, I pinched its wings. How my heart sank as my right thumbs and index finger went through its seemly unbreakable wings. Oh, dear God, how did my eyes have deceived me all these years?

On the way home, a sick realization slowly seeped through me – my own reason could not save me from seeking after a fake hologram. So beautiful and so alive was that dragonfly. In my eyes, it could have flapped its strong, powerful wings and flied away once the notebook has opened. No matters how intricate and large were its veins or those crystalline, enormous multifaceted pair of eyes; this insect was a forge, an illusion, and a fake. If that dragonfly was not real then what else in my life thus far has been false – holograms. I used to arrogantly say “I appreciate beauty,” but in reality, I was a knowledge-containing fool without any understanding of it. I had blindly followed images projected as splendors by my unreasonable pair of eyes. I used to shun “ugliness” and despised images portrayed through my eyes as lacking in color, too simple, and certainly not expensive enough. The dragonfly has stunned me back to reality. Since if a beautiful dragonfly was a hologram then an ugly dragonfly was reality. I rather pinch a real, and simple pairs of wings than any beautiful, fake pairs from an imagine dragonfly. Oh, only if my car was the Starship Enterprise and I am actually Sulu then believing in hologram would sound sane after all.

There is an old ritual in Vietnam – let a dragonfly stings your belly-button then you could naturally swim like a fish. I was not courageous enough to try it because it would hurt like hell. But now I, too, have borne a sting of a dragonfly so I could freely swim in a river of reality where everything is clean, simple and perfect.

I believe the eyes are the windows into all the deceptions and you should always be careful of the dragonfly.