Wandering Mind Series 1: “Her Eyes”
Hi friends! I want to write more on here, so I’ve decided to start a segment called the Wandering Mind Series, where I write a tiny bit of whatever I want and put it on here for you to interpret as you please. They may be fictional or nonfictional, anywhere from short stories to personal essays.
This one’s a little fiction I wrote recently, titled “Her Eyes.”
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“I like the way you do that,” he says.
“The way I do what?” she asks, setting the glass down on the dark cherry counter.
“The way you shut your right eye every time you drink. You do it when you’re swimming too,” he cracks his knuckles and settles back into his original position, chin resting unceremoniously on his interlaced fingers. “When you come up from underwater, you keep your right eye shut for a while until you touch your face. It’s like one of your eyes is more grown up than the other.”
“That’s stupid.”
“And when it rains, too, you look up and you shut your right eye. Every. Single. Freaking. Time. It’s adorable.”
“Shut up.”
“I like to think it’s because you look at the world through two different lenses, like there’s an old lady and a little kid living inside you and you gave them each a separate eye to see the world with.”
“I said shut up.” She clenches her fists and scowls.
“Your left eye has seen it all, I think. It’s always the first one to shed a tear, like the right eye doesn’t know yet why it should be sad, but the left one, the more experienced one, knows. It’s seen its share of heartbreaks, and can’t stand it anymore. It’s seen too much for its own good.”
“Do you even hear what you’re saying? So my right eye is a bit more sensitive–who cares? Stop poeticizing every little thing I do; it’s embarrassing.” She picks up her glass again to take another drink, but stops before doing so. “I swear, it’s like you’re like a little kid.”
“And when you wake up too–the left one is the first one to open, like it doesn’t want to waste a single second. You have to rub the right one before it does anything. Why is that, I wonder? Maybe the right eye hasn’t learned how precious time is yet. That beautifully, blissfully ignorant right eye. I love it. I love it–I really do.”
She just sits there for a moment, half scowling at his childishness and half marveling at his attention to detail. His words weren’t charged with lust or romance, but rather a simple admiration for things she had dismissed as forgettable or useless. He wasn’t in love with her–she just mattered to him. Not because of her looks, not because of her personality, and not because of her accomplishments. It was in the way she lived her life, the way she went about her every day–It mattered to him, and for no particular reason at all.
“Sometimes, I just don’t get you.” She gives up on her stare down with the oblivious man-child.
He beams at this, scrunching his nose and showing teeth like a puppy who just won a Tug-of-War.
“Isn’t it more fun that way?”
It’s her turn to smile now. A smirk on the left corner of her mouth morphs into a full-faced grin, and eventually erupts into a bounding laughter that echoes off the dimly lit walls of the nearly empty bar. He raises his glass, which practically only holds ice at this point, and bellows to no one in particular–
“Cheers to the new year!”
She laughs even harder than before, as she raises her glass and meets his with a satisfying clink. As they drink what little watered down liquid they have left, he sneaks a look at her. Both her eyes are closed.
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Hope you guys like this mini scene! I wrote this in mid-despair at NOT being able to write my scholarship application essays, and I didn’t know what to do with it. The weird eye thing that “she” has is actually something that I have too. All the stuff about closing it involuntarily when drinking, swimming, waking up, etc. is totally true. I like to pretend that it’s because my eyes have different personalities or something. I dunno.
If you enjoyed and would like more, please let me know! I’m happy to write as much as I can so feedback is much appreciated.
Much love,
Erin