The Light We Forgot

 Title: The Light We Forgot

When the scanners first became commonplace, people began to see themselves differently. Not in mirrors, but in glows. The new “bio-spectrum cameras” could capture the faint biophoton emissions from every living thing—a soft shimmer, different in hue and rhythm for each person. Newsfeeds filled with luminescent portraits. Teenagers compared their “soul tones,” corporations sold glow-enhancing diets, and somewhere amid the algorithms and the filters, a quiet wonder began to stir.

Dr. Hesvitha had helped design the first prototype. She wasn’t the kind of scientist who chased fame—she wanted to see what had always been invisible. For decades, researchers like Fritz Popp had hinted that light wasn’t just a byproduct of life, but its language. A faint conversation of photons streaming between cells, a soft orchestra of order. Elara had once told her students, “Every heartbeat is an act of light.”

But now, years later, she found herself uneasy. The world had turned the discovery into spectacle. The glow was quantified, ranked, sold. Scores of brightness became new measures of success. She saw her reflection on a digital billboard once, her face lit by a thousand microscopic suns, captioned: “Find your brightest self.” She sighed. We didn’t need to find it, she thought. We already are it.

One evening, after a long day of consultations, Dr. Hesvitha sat in her dim apartment, the city lights below flickering like thought itself. She turned off every lamp until the room went dark. Then she closed her eyes.

Somewhere deep in the quiet, she could feel the glow—not as a sight but as a hum, a presence. The pulse in her wrist, the warmth behind her ribs, the unspoken communication among the trillions of cells that were her. Light, slowed into life.

Her mind drifted to the old texts she used to read in college—the Upanishads, Meister Eckhart, the desert mystics. All had spoken of an inner fire, a divine spark. Back then, she had thought it poetic. Now, she wondered if ancient language had simply guessed the physics.

Later, she stepped onto her balcony. Across the street, a child was holding his mother’s hand, watching a moth circle a streetlamp. The tiny creature shimmered faintly in the glow, as if illuminated from within. The boy laughed and pointed. The mother smiled. And in that instant,  Hesvitha realized what the data had never captured: the light was not just within us—it between us. Every act of attention, of kindness, was an exchange of radiance.

The next morning, she returned to her lab with a new question, one that no instrument could yet answer: If every living system glows, do our thoughts ripple through that same light? When we love, forgive, or despair—does the pattern change? She began small experiments—measuring coherence when her subjects meditated, when they sang together, when they simply sat in silence holding hands. The results astonished her. The collective glow increased. It was as if awareness itself tuned the body into harmony.

Months passed. The project drew attention, of course, but  Hesvitha avoided publicity. The findings were too delicate, too easily distorted into another fad. She wrote in her private notes:

“The light does not need to be found. It needs to be remembered.”

And then one night, during a thunderstorm, the power grid failed. The entire city went dark. Screens flickered off, neon signs died. For the first time in decades, no artificial light masked the stars. People poured onto balconies and rooftops, gazing upward. Millions of tiny living lanterns—humans, birds, trees, insects—merging into one great fluorescence under the cosmic sky.

Some swore afterward they could see a faint blush around their neighbors, a soft luminescent field when they laughed or hugged or cried. Maybe it was imagination. Maybe it was memory.

But for that one night, the boundaries blurred. The same photons that had sparked in the hearts of stars were burning quietly in lungs and leaves and lovers. The universe looked back at itself and whispered, I am.

When the lights came on again, the world felt a fraction more awake. People still took glow selfies, still shared their “luminosity ratings,” but sometimes, when someone smiled at a stranger or planted a tree, there was a pause—a flicker—as if they sensed a deeper truth passing between them.

Dr. Hesvitha  would later write her final paper, On the Continuity of Light. It ended with a single line:

“You are the night sky made self-aware, a constellation of cells whispering in photons. And every time you remember this, the universe brightens—just a little.”

And it did.