Reflection

By April Freely ‘04

And colors blur (yet that sandy gray blob sticks out at me, that color of concrete and hardness—strength like surface tension) and time slows, as I focus, and I see him in front of me now.  A bridge of nose, tiny moles around the eyes peppered like freckles.  Deep lines in the cheeks, eyes with lashes long and curled.  Searching eyes.  I don’t remember dialogue.  But I remember the look in his eyes, and on this day on this particular bus, many looked at him like he was some crazy annoying old man, others looked at him with pity, I looked at him, because I saw that he wanted to see his reflection in my eyes.

I am convinced my eyes are shrinking.  I look in the mirror in the morning and it seems that everyday they have shrunken ever so slightly.  It is becoming very obvious to me that lately my eyes have been shrinking, so that my vision begins to tunnel and the colors and the faces blur around me and all I can see now is this sandy gray blob of sidewalk.  I pass blurry, disfigured faces every day, and there is silence.  No acknowledgement.  We do not exist.  I realize most are content to not exist beside me. But within that mass of thoughts and ideas and avoidance, where is the divergence between is?  What is in the cells, the axons, dendrites that makes this silence possible?

I pass blurry, disfigured faces every day, and there is silence.  No acknowledgement.  We do not exist.

Dialogue: Today it was, “…I know you have an answer because you’re looking so thoughtful…that’s what I told her in the first place…okay so I’ll meet you then.”  But when there is no dialogue, what are the bonds that tie us?  I touch my finger to the puddle to see how the divergence is.

The divergence is more like a mutation.  It is the overgrown, expanded, magnified form of one error in one single amino acid, somewhere.  That amino acid now makes a different protein, that change in protein now causes an alteration in the biology, and so now there is microscopic divergence between us.  Yet it is visible, so visible now that it seems impossible to get back to that one place, that one error, where everything happened.

What is it about the eyes that lets me see so much about you in them?  How is it that through the eyes of a stranger I feign I get a glimpse of them, their reality, looking at the sadness there, the optimism (breaking down the fog, the divergence, the silence between.)  This is why on those commercials asking you to donate money to kids in far away countries, the babies’ eyes are always so shiny and big and pure.  Their eyes aren’t shrinking, they are available, they are eager.

But then, when my father’s friend tells us how he feels about whatever it is that he is feeling, and I can see why he liked my father, and I can see why my father liked him, I am uncomfortable for him because I see him too well.  He is too vulnerable.  I see his world reflected in his eyes, and I am uncomfortable for me because I see that my attention begins to wane, I look around the room, at the ceiling, at my sneakers, because I see that my eyes are shrinking, and I see that I am not there (so many others in the room are with me, not there).

I realize that there is only the slightest divergence somewhere, separating us, in some amino acid, some base of DNA, yet I divert my eyes away from him.

That sandy gray color is more like black.  No, maybe more like absence, or space (and I am not there.)  Our eyes respond best to edges.  To contours, bound to the places where one thing ends and another begins (which is probably why we cling so to the surfaces of things.)  This color is more like the absence of interest, of form; or better, a solid fog that seeps between cracks and fills in all of the spaces (for air, for words, for glances to develop).

There is a constant struggle to communicate.  Something.  We long for something to bridge the gap, to clasp a hand, between the masses of me (“…that’s what I told her in the first place…”) with the community of you (across the surface of the water, through smoke and through silence.)

As if I was still a child, I jump into the puddle and I notice this time the way the water reflects me, and in that reflection I am aware of the separation, between me and everything beneath the surface.  I am aware that the girl I see is only a reflection of me.  I’m sure all children know the secret about puddles: it’s in the shattering (the shouting in spite of water’s surface tension) there’s something critical in the way the water breaks, splashes all around us.  What attracts me this time, when I step into it, is how close I get to the me beneath it all.

I am convinced my eyes are shrinking.  As I walk past the man with his cup as he shakes it at me, I can’t get the sound of the change rattling out of my head, and I don’t look at him.  I don’t see him, because I am afraid of my reflection in his eyes.  At the same time I reach out for the shattering of the silence between us, I hide behind the fact that I never really have to see him.  I realize that there is only the slightest divergence somewhere, separating us, in some amino acid, some base of DNA, yet I divert my eyes away from him (back into the concrete). A peaceful coexistence.  I wonder just how many people are content to coexist beside us.

There seemed to be a truth I could not run from.  Sometimes in a glance there are too many words, and they just hand out there invisibly in the space between us, and I wish that it would rain, so that the words would come to me in rivers, or that they would float out to me on smoke, because my eyes are shrinking.  And sometimes, I’m just too afraid to look.