To See All But SeeingDecember 6, 2006
Andrew looked at Kate as if she were new. He had never noticed the tiny freckles of light grey in her hazel eyes, but now this seemed to be the only attractive thing about her. The pores of her nose and cheeks were bigger than usual, oil issued freely from them. The hairs of her eyebrows was uncombed and dandruff flakes hid beneath. Her nostrils moved more than usual, they snorted at him.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said. “You’re just going to dump me? Just like that?” The whites of her eyes were etched with sprawling red lines. Andrew did not answer her. She spun, her hair lashed his face, and she trotted away. She got smaller, but he saw her with constant clarity. At first he thought it was his memory, the possiblility that he would never see her again, that retained her image in his eyes. He squinted. He could see the tangled split ends of her long hair as clearly as if they were inches from his face, although she was now blocks away.
Andrew heard the voices of people on the street around him, but they were muffled, and faded in and out, as if through a thick cloud of white noise. His hearing, his smelling, all of his senses were dull, except his vision.
That night, after heavy drinking, he went to his front lawn. He lied down in the grass, hands behind his head, and looked at the stars. He found Jupiter. It was a slolid yellow color and did not twinkle. He relaxed and stared for a while until he could see the moons around the planet. He saw Jupiter’s big red spot, saw the clouds around the surface stirring like water. He looked closer, he could see the droplets that formed the clouds. They spun like maniacs.
It was like he was zooming in and there was no limit to his lens. Except unlike a camera, though he knew every droplet in the clouds of Jupiter, the rest of the night sky was not forced out of the shot. Each star of a thousand galaxies penetrated his eyes with their crackling fiery cores.
He imagined himself, his eyes, pupils growing wider and wider, empty black fading lightly out of them until they began to glow.
