erikahammerschmidt:

Poem about eyes, neurodivergence, plural systems, and the meaninglessness of ‘normal’

The neurotypical proverb
“eyes are windows to the soul”
makes far more sense
when you consider:

1. the windows of a house are there primarily
   for whoever’s on the inside
   to look out
   and
2. the sun is brighter
   than the lightbulbs in a house
   so people standing outside
   looking at the windows
   will see mostly the reflection
   of themselves
   projected on the glass
   and
3. you’re standing there outside my house
   and staring at my windows
   trying to look in
   and that’s extremely
   rude and creepy
   please do not.

and also do not try to tell me
that I’m bad with metaphors

the idea of seeing feelings
in the eyes of other people
used to seem so fake to me

like that was just a metaphor
we used in stories
“I saw worry in her eyes”
I wasn’t certain
what was really meant,
but guessed that it was more
about the eyebrows and the eyelids
because (except for the dilation of the pupils)
the eyeballs couldn’t possibly be changing?

But if that was a metaphor
then what was the significance
of light, of brightness?
To say, her eyes were shining

Or to say he was a bright-eyed child
until he had the measles shot
then all the light just vanished from his eyes

like in anime, when someone’s dead inside
the artist will stop drawing the reflections on the cornea

do neurotypicals believe that eyeballs emit light
to signal the existence of the soul?

I tried to understand, and I still don’t completely
and I still think it’s partially a metaphor

But a metaphor for something only trivially different

Not light, and not exactly from the eyeballs

but a difference in the focusing of light
the way emotion shapes the eyelids and the eyebrows
and the thickness of the clinging coat of unshed tears

to alter how the light is funneled
through reflection

of course it doesn’t indicate a soul
and of course the guesses you can make
from what you see of that reflected light
are nothing like telepathy

no matter how much you might think
you see a person’s whole internal truth
through eyes

but it’s also not some mystical imagining

the reflections of the light are there
and feelings do affect them
and neurotypicals aren’t totally delusional

I recently looked deep into the eyes
of someone that I’d known for a while

I saw for the first time, her eyes were hazel
that color between colors
that can catch the light like alexandrite, shifting hues

and so I asked her, do your eyes change color
and she said yes, and sometimes it’s from different lighting
but (and here she hesitated)
it’s mostly based on who is fronting

she meant her headmates
the different personalities inside her brain
and she said it with a bit of fear,
like I might call her crazy,
or worse, accuse her of pretending to be crazy

like I might tell her
headmates aren’t a thing, you made them up
and even if they were
they couldn’t change the color of your eyes
like some possessing demon in a movie

but see, the thing is
I’d already gotten through all that
with my attempts at understanding
neurotypicals and light

and who’s to say it isn’t true
that when she feels

whatever shift in her identity
she calls
a change in fronting

that her feelings in that moment
shape the eyelids and the eyebrows
and the coat of tears
to bend the light to a refraction
that brings out the green or blue or brown…

who says that would be
any weirder than normality?