Sight’s Deception

My friend Lola once asked me: “Do people ever stare at you? Like, when you’re on the train, do people ever stare at you?” 

“Sure,” I said, unphased, “everyone gets ogled on the train.”

“No,” she said, “not everyone. You seem like the type of person who would.”

In the past six years, I don’t think my mind has had a day off from interrogating this interaction. People always stare at me...like on the train. Sometimes straight on, sometimes with their heads cocked to the side in stylish wonder, sometimes with their faces deep in whatever Wall Street Journal article they’re reading, with their pupils sneakily pushed against some upper corner. They just stare. Mostly men, sometimes women. I don’t think it makes me any more special than the millions of others who garner attention each day, but people can be so bold. I was taught that it’s rude to stare—what would their parents think? I watch them looking at me, their eyes mulling over the earthy tones and satisfyingly opposing patterns of my dress. Do they ever see me watching them? If they did it would mean they really were looking at me. But they won’t ever really look at me, and that is why they’re not afraid of being seen. I am. I like to think otherwise, but so is not the case. I am afraid of being seen, or rather, I’m afraid that in being seen, I will never amount to more than someone’s projector screen. I am afraid that being seen will overshadow any chance of being known. 

It’s like the boy in English class with whom you shared a kiss sophomore year. Is he looking at you or through you while he ponders his white guilt? Does he like how dainty you look when you sit with your legs crossed and your collarbone breaking out from under thick layers of skin? Are you looking at him? Look away. Look back. He lingers. The same game you play with the brown haired boy in fifth grade who can’t love you because the teacher can’t pronounce your name and because “he’s only twelve.” The one who mouths “gazuntite” across the room when you sneeze during reading hour.

It’s like my father, who I see, on average, biannually. Each time I approach him at the place we’re meant to meet, for a flash of a second I am a stranger to him as anyone on the street might be. As we embrace, I transform into an old friend, and as he takes in my features both the withstanding and the malleable, I become a series of contradictions he does not wish to synthesize. And I think: Let’s not ruin a good moment. Over some meal idea of his we brandish saccharine smiles of chagrin as each takes their turn relaying the details of life since the last rendezvous. He asks when my hair gained its brassy hue, and I tell him that it was hard to work around the blonde. “Blonde?” 

“Yeah, I was blonde for about a year and a half, but then I felt like it was time to change it up.”

He tells me about the house he is renting—the second since the split. He tells me how he’s getting gigs again and that he’s going to Australia in June. I ask him if I can come. “Not this time boohbah” An homage to the British show I watched as a kid? I should ask him sometime. Inevitably it comes back to this: “I’m really trying to make it back up here permanently.”

“Really? Before I graduate, you think?”

“That’s the plan.”

Which will inevitably lead to this: 

“We were a little team you and I.”

He looks at me. I simultaneously shrink and grow in his mind. 

“I brushed that hair. I kissed those cheeks, played piggies with those tiny toes.”

And he’ll tell me of how I used to be right handed until he went on a work trip and my mother converted me. We’ll talk about the shows we used to watch together and how some (Blue’s Clues) were better than others (everything on Disney—he hates Disney). In my mind I’ll be transported; I’ll see the steam rising up from the cup-o-noodles we shared for lunch and feel myself tossed under an arm like a football or a knucklehead sandwich. 

And as our timer runs out, and our resurrection falls short, the two of us become ghosts once again. The bodies of a three-year-old girl and her daddy fade away back into the walls of a beloved apartment, leaving a musician and a young actress in a Chinese restaurant on West 4th Street. 

I want to be famous one day so that I can make sure everyone knows me. So that the people on the train, and the boys in English class, and the friends named Lola, and the dads in Australia have to know me, or at least have to want to know me. So that simply seeing will always come at a price to them.