It's All in the Eyes

For some reason I've always been surrounded by people with gorgeous eyes. An ex of mine had green eyes with flecks of red, something I have yet to see replicated on any other person. Even though when I was little I viewed my mom's eyes as something akin to "mud puddles," as I matured I came to realize that she has what I like to call "tiger eyes": light brown with slight yellow-topaz streaks, lending her gaze a bit of a feline quality. My dad, on the other hand, has deep forest green eyes--they remind me of what pastures in Ireland must look like. And probably the first thing I noticed about my husband was his eyes as well (I'm undoubtedly not alone in this category--I've read that many people notice this feature first in prospective boyfriends or girlfriends). He has deep blue eyes with a ring of brown around the pupil, which particularly stands out against his tan skin and black hair (lucky dog!). Even my cat, Penny, has an intriguing set of irises, sometimes almost overtaken by huge black pupils when she's "hunting" something (most likely my ankles), other times sparkly gold in the sunlight, her pupils barely visible.

My train of thought turned to eyes today as I recalled a magnetic pair I saw yesterday. They belonged to an inhabitant of the local Petsmart a few blocks away from our apartment. As we were examining the different pets on display--the hamsters, exotic birds, and beta fish--my own eyes were arrested by a bewitching set of peepers. They belonged to a whitish-peach gecko in a glass terrarium. It had started to crawl under a branch in its cage and there it crouched for some minutes while I watched it, transfixed. We both just stood there, immobile. If I was a cartoon character, I would have had those typical swirly spirals spinning in my head instead of eyes, and looking at that gecko I understood why people may have believed at one time that reptiles could hypnotize a person (a la "Jungle Book"). The gecko's pupils were but a mere slit of black, and around them danced an iridescent collage of sparkling green and gold, like dichroic glass jewelry found at an open marketplace. The iris' colors appeared to ooze and mix as if liquid mercury, as if constantly shifting with smooth ease.

My husband finally broke the spell, asking me, "What are you looking at?" With a little shake of my head I came back to reality, even though I had only been "mesmerized" for no more than a minute. After seeing the beady black eyes of the colorful birds not a moment before, like tiny black holes in space absorbing all the movements and information around them, I decided that no set of eyes is superior. All eyes are "windows into the soul," as is so often quoted. But those gecko eyes, I had to admit, were a work of art.