Eyes.

I always loved spreading a blanket out on the soft, rain-nourished grass on a bright day. I always loved laying on my back, arms and legs spread wide like a starfish, taking up as much space as I could. I always loved pointing and flexing my toes, feeling the muscles in my legs tense and release, tense and release, my tendons and ligaments and skin and bones minutely quivering in their perfect alignment, knowing that they were built by me and for me. Knowing that they were built to work together to carry me and hold me. Knowing that they will use their strength when I have none to bring me to the places that I need to go and do the things that I need to do. Knowing that they will relax and just be in the moments that I need to just be.

And in the moments I spend on that blanket in the ever-shining sun, I feel that I can just be. Just breathe and feel my body as it should be. Strong and safe and healthy. Warm and nourished and whole. Living by myself, for myself, of myself, absorbing the life around me and allowing myself to be absorbed by that very life that sustains me.

I always loved pointing my face toward the sun, keeping my eyes so wide for so long that the breeze sweeps across the surface of my eyeballs, drying them out. And even when they’re dry, I hold them open for half a second longer until my vision becomes wavy and blurry with the tears that inevitably come to remoisten them. When I finally close my eyes, I shut them so tightly that those tears roll down my cheeks, charting a stream from the outer corners of my eyes to the inner folds of my ears, dripping into my hair, kissing it with my own natural saltiness.

I always loved closing my eyes so tightly that the skin around my eyelids and eyebrows and eyelashes condensed and folded into undulating ripples that I could imagine a tiny camel marching across as if in a vast and dry desert. The small breeze that I feel becomes an enormous and overpowering gust of wind for that camel, threatening a sand storm if only the mounds of my skin would flake and fly wildly in never-ending cycles and swoops of air. The tiny camel braves the storm to come upon the stream amongst the hills. My own tears from eyes to ears give that camel much-needed hydration. He fills his hump with enough water to carry him through another thousand miles and he goes off into the distance, beyond the ripples of skin beneath my eyes and gets lost in the wilderness that is my hair, gathered in a loose and winding braid.

Once the camel is safely on his way, I relax the muscles in my face, feeling them shake so slightly that if you were looking, you wouldn’t see it, no matter how much I told you I could feel it. No matter how much I told you that they shook so intensely that I feared that that desert was about to turn into the smoothest surface to ever suffer an earthquake. They shake so much that I feel my eyeballs abruptly move from side to side and though I want to open my eyes and see that I am still on that blanket, and feel that I am still grounded in the natural world, I don’t and I won’t.

I always loved letting that shakiness stutter and stall and eventually stop altogether and letting my face relax fully. I always loved that feeling of falling into security after the storm has passed. And in this moment of security, I let my eyeballs float in their sockets, imagining what it must be like to be tethered to something by only the slightest of threads, what it must be like for the eyeballs to have the freedom of movement within their allotted spaces, and how it must feel for them to know that they can never leave and live a life untethered.

I always wonder if they know that they serve a purpose by being tied up in their little pools of moisture. I always wonder if they wish that they could switch places and see the world from a different perspective like I try to do every day. I always wonder if they look at other eyes and wonder what it would be like to live in those pools instead, tethered to a different brain entirely, living a different life and seeing different things. I wish that I could tell them how grateful I am for the world that they give me. That I can see the vibrant colors under the sea and read book after book on monsters or love or magic or life or sisters or mothers or food or dogs or….

I wonder if they even like the same things that I do or if they just have to endure the world as I want. Or if that makes my brain the puppeteer, pulling on their strings and forcing them to see and feel and breathe when they may not want to. Or if they know that my brain will be there for them just like my legs are there for me. That it was built to guide us and carry us and fill us up and process everything that we see and do.

So then there’s always the moment where I keep my body completely still. The only movements that I make are the involuntary ones. My heart beats in my chest. My chest and belly rise as I imagine that my body fills from the tip of my toes to the top of my head with air, filling me up, up, up, up until I am so full that I may burst. So full that it hurts. And then I let it go.

And then I let my eyes move beneath my lids, side to side. Up and down. Back and forth and around and around around. I imagine that they’re twirling like the vertigo swirl. I imagine that they’re skating on ice and swimming in the sea. I feel their roundness graze the thin film of my eyelids and I inhale and think SAT and exhale and think LAM.

Inhale and think SAT. Exhale and think LAM.

And again, and again, and again, and again, and again until I drift off to sleep, arms and legs spread wide like a starfish on that blanket in the grass, cloaked in sunlight.

 

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10.26.17