Her Eyes Do Not Break
by Jacqueline Johnson
January 14, 2008 — Published in Accounts & Glimpses
Like the marbles that fall to the floor during child’s play, her eyes are sturdy. They do not break.
She doesn’t smile much, that woman. Eyes averted, she is the lone bird left to perch on an iron-wrought fence on a foggy, winter morning.
She’s the old bird who sits through winter, waiting for spring. She’s never the first to leave.
She says nothing.
She can’t speak. Her words would drown her listener with the pain of having seen.
She doesn’t need to speak, though. The silence gives her away.
They don’t talk about her much, about how she holds it in, but they know she does.
With each methodical exhale, she looks as though she’s being pierced, tortured even. Each breath acknowledges what she has seen, what she now remembers, what she knows.
Her memory afflicts her body with a slowness that can only come with the latter stages of old age, like the body’s final surrender to gravity.
Out of all the body parts, eyes are the first to see. Eyes come alive as the rest of the body stills itself. Even in sleep.
Her eyes should be painted black by now, the other women say.
They can’t understand how her eyes are still the same green-tinted blue mini-earths that spin on their own axes from when she was a child.
Her eyes are like stained glass, they say. Her body stores the trauma and grief in all the wrinkles and loose skin, but her eyes remain.
Eyes do not speak. They remain like eternal full moons with secret craters. The blemishes appear only through other means. No one attempts to build a spaceship to discover her.
They don’t want to leave their ozone layer. Her moons offer no life, they say.
Eyes hear what you’re not saying. Eyes hear the creak of decay below the layers of sediment in your voice and the dust of dishonesty in your facial lines.
Her eyes are the dots connecting the outside world to her core. Eyes take the heat of the sun, the brunt of the truth. Her eyes are like windows for her mind: her mind is protected inside like a child prodigy.
Her eyes create. She can see sunflowers growing, facing the sun, in the middle of snow-trodden ground.
Her eyes are like the plants exposed to the erupting volcano’s lava, they say. She probably doesn’t remember what it was, they say.
She loathes their ignorance and the pure complacency that keeps them ignorant.
She sacrifices her taut skin, her innocence, for having known.
Eyes do not fear. They do not shut themselves to death. The body betrays the eyes, eyes do not hold the body up to idols for sacrifice. They are simply the mediators between souls.
But she does not shield her eyes from the sun, no.
She keeps her eyes open.
Her eyes remain steadfast in the truth.
If she spoke, she’d tell them that pain is reality. Joy is reality. They are one in the same, as we should be praiseful during life for both. What is joy without having known pain? What is pain without having known joy? Neither exists without the other.
Day after day, silence arrests her.
Her voice is fragile; she cannot rupture ignorance’s silence.
The only death she hasn’t seen is her own.
But she doesn’t feel pain because seeing is not what stings. Her eyes feel nothing.
Like sapphire gems, her eyes hold the world’s mysteries inside themselves. She lives in the loneliness this awareness brings.
Her eyes do not break.
Illustration by Lacey Anderson.
Jacqueline Johnson
Jacqueline Johnson is a published freelance writer and has been involved in magazine journalism for seven years. She has interned with Smithsonian Magazine and several local newspapers. Jacqueline is currently at Mercer University studying journalism and women's and gender studies.
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