While I am here, I’ve been experimenting with the power of eye contact. No, that’s not true, I always experiment with eye contact. At home, and here. Mostly when I’m walking—walking to class with my headphones filling my skull with guitars, walking to church and admiring the early Sunday light, crossing the street to the library, strolling around the red brick of my Dublin neighborhood, the strewn beer cans of my Athens one, both bursting with oak trees and lilac bushes. When I am walking, I make eye contact with the people I pass, even if I shouldn’t. To be honest, I don’t know how not to make eye contact with them. The man walking towards me is easily the most interesting thing on the street this morning, and if I look at his pale, button-down shirt or his swishing blue jeans, he might get the wrong idea—though that’s not really the point, because it’s not his clothes that are the most interesting thing, it’s his face, let’s be honest—it’s his pale, not-shaved-for-three-days face with brown stubble shadowing his chin and cheeks, his almost-black eyes, bushy eyebrows and pleasantly straight nose. It’s the way one corner of his mouth turns down more than the other, the long-faded scar on his left temple, the dark, dark eyes. The most interesting thing. And if I look at anything else I feel stupid, like a person walking down the road staring straight up into the sky—I’m sorry, Sir, but I really want to make eye contact with you. Please, please, please, don’t freak out. No I’m not a creep, I don’t think. And no I’m not hitting on you, unless you’re eyes are a surprising shade of blue/green/brown, and unless you lift one corner of your mouth when you look at me. Then I might be hitting on you, but please, just carry on and forget about my prying as soon as our shoulders pass.
So the experiment goes. The trouble is that here in Dublin, I walk much more than I do at home, and I pass more people on these busy streets than I do in my sleepy town. Many more eyes to build bridges to. And when I’m not walking—instead of sitting in class with eyes I know, or at home with essays and assignments—I’m sitting in pubs or cafes with tables and tables of new eyes with new faces around them. Sitting in my favorite local coffee shop, a comfy green armchair, tea at my left elbow, and across the way, under a red and yellow painting of a woman with startling, bright eyes—can you imagine what they were in the flesh!—is a twenty-something woman with half her head shaved, the other half thick with dark curls. Her features are almost masculine in their straight, clean angles, a stud in one nostril, many rings on her fingers—silver, jade, bronze. She sits back in her chair with her legs crossed, unabashed and emphasizing her strong, broad shoulders, her muscular thighs. When she notices my gaze, her eyes—an unexpected pale green—flash back. The very left corner of her mouth pulls up, then more. I squint slightly. We look away. Experiment 6235, Result – Positive.
In a club I scan the room while my housemates return to their native languages. So I’m slightly bored, but there is a man—long and clean limbed, dark brown hair cut short. Jaw bone like the flint edge of an arrowhead only slightly hidden by a short beard. I can’t tell the color of his eyes. But he sits at a table across the room and listens to his friend, who does most of the talking. Patience in the easy rest of his shoulders against the leather booth, patience in the stead tilt of his head, patience in listening to the other’s monologue, patience the way we indulge those we love, not because we are willing to wait out their long soliloquies, but because we love to watch them be who they are. Absolutely attentive. And in his absolute attention, he looks at nothing else. Experiment 6236, Result – Inconclusive.
In a sense I’m testing love at first sight—well, not love in the romantic sense, at least, not always. Connection at first sight. Is it all in the eyes?
I’m testing Socrates’ theory that each of our souls takes after a god, and that physical attraction is a recognition of compatible godliness in another—are you the Hephaestus to my Aphrodite, or the Hestia to my Hera? Can you see that in my eyes? Can I?
Walking out of St. Stephen’s Green towards home, the afternoon slipping over into sunset, light going gold. I turned the corner at the motorcycle shop, the bright shiny bikes already removed from the sidewalk, and begin my long straight-shot down Camden Road. But just past the bike shop, cramped against the 7-11, is a glass-front café, and at the front table facing out, a pair of brilliant blue eyes, lit from the bright sun slanting in southwest to northeast. Stop. My boot soles slow in their steady long strides. Arrested by blue. And somehow, some trick of the setting sun, some slant to the light, my face is lit as well, bright and glowing amber, reflected in the glass, my own brown eyes reflected. I see him looking at me, and I see me looking at him, side by side, our faces almost overlaid. I watch the left corner of my mouth pull up. I notice him set down his mug of tea, back on the saucer in front of him. I see him. I see him seeing me. I see me. I see blue. His eyes still as bright as they were two seconds before, shot with lighter gray.
The brick wall of the 7-11 intercedes between us, as my steps carry me farther down this Dublin street. Experiment 6237 – Conclusive. No further tests necessary.
Eveline Crosses Back 