On eyes

I don’t have eyes like a swan, the boy used to tell me. But I persisted. Initially, I was unsure. Too feminine of a word to use it as a compliment for the boy? But it was true, eyes like a swan: dark round brown, definite against the white surrounding, the lids almost almond-shaped and the lashes, curved towards the side.

In the picture they are black and white: his eyes, hair, t-shirt. He is sitting in a wooden cabin, and now that I look at it, I know: It was that day, in the woods. On a wooden bench, surrounded by trees and trees and trees. The boy looks straight into the camera. He doesn’t smile. His glance is clear and blurred at the same time. When I took the picture, his hands were resting on my waist, his head leaned against the wall behind him. His look, black and white and pure.

The eyes: only part of the human body, that doesn’t grow, doesn’t shrink. The eyes remain the same throughout a lifetime. While the rest of our bodies shoot up, our faces around them get slender, our lids -it’s true- get heavier, the eyeballs remain, at least in their size, unchanged. Beginning to end. And maybe it is this, that has the effect. When I looked into the boy’s eyes, all that was fast-moving and volatile and uncertain didn’t make its way from the world into the tunnel that our looks created.