MacBook boots fine in recovery but not to OS

I have a Early 2012 13’” rMBP that will boot up fine to recovery mode (holding option brings up the boot selector) and will successfully allow me to reinstall the operating system.

I reinstalled the operating system through recovery, but it still boots to a black screen with white rectangles and a mouse cursor.

I thought this might be a GPU issue, but it does boot up into recovery and that works perfectly fine, and even when it boots into the OS and displays rectangles, it still displays the mouse cursor (and lets me move it around).

It also takes an abnormally long time to boot up, over 10 minutes before it boots to the black screen with rectangles.

While I was writing this, the computer booted up to a different screen, this time a white background and a black box in the top left.

The mouse cursor disappeared after I clicked on one of the black boxes, but it came back after a few minutes.

After a few minutes the screen returned to the black screen with white rectangles.

Update with image of display working in recovery:

Update 2: Well, I tried booting in Safe Mode, and Safe Mode works? I'm really not sure why.