When do we realize that life is just an illusion? That what we see is merely what we want to see? Is it when we wake up one morning? Or when the red carpet is silently pulled from beneath our feet?

That morning, when they took off their glasses, everything changed. The grand red carpet that had stretched before them was suddenly gone. It had been there last night—hadn’t it? Or had it never been there at all? Had the glasses been showing them a world that wasn’t truly theirs?

The Little Prince’s fox once said, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” But they had spent years looking with their eyes, seeing through their glasses. They thought of the boa constrictor swallowing the elephant—the one they had drawn as a child. The grown-ups had insisted it was just a hat. Maybe their entire life had been nothing more than that—just a hat, not what it truly was.

As they walked down the street, people still acted as if the red carpet were there. As if nothing had changed. But now, they weren’t sure—was it ever real, or had everyone simply chosen to believe in it?

Maybe seeing wasn’t the point. Maybe feeling was.

But what if they never found it?

Or… what if they had never needed it at all?

“Did we truly lose the red carpet, or was it never there to begin with?”
The questions were always there. The answers, however, had never been behind the glasses—they had been inside them all along.