#I do really like my eyes | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

parksprout · 2 months ago

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This evening my eyes in the mirror seemed sinister.

Tonight in those couple of moments while water ran over my gillette in the sink and my cheeks began to burn from shaving cream seeping into fresh razor burn, I found myself staring into my own eyes. Usually when I'm seeing my own eyes it's a moment of appreciation for them as a gift. My close friend Matt's eyes are half broken, one optical nerve fully severed from a childhood skating accident and the other lacking all sense of depth. Mrs. Starns from 3rd grade made us read about Helen Keller, listen to Stevie Wonder and take a test in braille when we got a new blind classmate towards the beginning of our second semester. My own eyes are dysfunctional, but beautiful. Usually when I'm seeing my own eyes it isn't in the mirror, but on the screen after my phones lens captured the last-of-too-many selfies I've sent my partner that day. I always make my eyes the center of attention. Sometimes I let my hair cover half my face, but always one eye will peak out to remind the world of my favorite feature. Sometimes I'll take a picture too close to my nose, only these orbs of blue and green discernable on my otherwise distorted face. But tonight, and on others, the same feature that makes my eyes uniquely beautiful, reminds me of the only ones I can thank for my dual, bi-colored irises. Closer to my tear ducts, to my emotions, to my sobs, my eyes are mossy. They're the color of the twelve years of child support my mother left unpaid. They are the color of the forests I've fallen in love with along the creeks of Kentucky, and the color of the rolling green isles my ancestors long ago fled from. They are the color of my mothers eyes. They are the eyes she used to stare forward down the road while she abducted me and my siblings from our first real home. They are the eyes that she used while procuring meth, and marijuana, and liquor in the deserts of Nevada. They are the eyes she used to stare down at commissary paper while she wrote me letters years later, while she drew some of the most beautiful portraits and pieces of art I've ever seen. They are the eyes we share. Though they are no more present than the green, most people perceive my eyes to be blue. Blue like those of my father, ever present in my life, but always absent. Blue like his stained jeans while he worked under the dark green 00' Ford Taurus he drove for over 300,000 miles till it died in my early teens. Icy like his listless gaze over permission slips stacked neatly on his dresser; soon he'd forget about them, then yell when I gave a stuttered reminder that I needed ten dollars. Cerulean like the bank logo stamped on our eviction notice in the final wave of foreclosures during the recession. They are blue like the shaving cream he never taught me how to apply, like the razor covered in blood that he never showed me how to hold. They are the cold eyes of my father, the eyes of a man who saved me from moss-eyes clutches just to resent me more and more as the years wore on. They are the eyes we share. I peeled myself away from the mirror eventually. I washed my face, rubbed ointment into the still burning gouges in my skin, and balled up my shirt. My face was wet even after drying it with a towel, but I refused to look back at those eyes, back into the ice and the moss.

Like the shameful child I sometimes feel like, I refuse to step back to the mirror and look my parents in the eye.