My daughter's eyes

Friday Fragment #17

I had thought to collect them all, once no longer in use – my daughter’s spectacles – but at some point started to lose track, perhaps sight, of the odd pair here and there. One rescued pair was missing an arm (a temple, as optometrical parlance would have it). Two further pairs were now each represented by just a singular arm. They have never failed to recall for me the fragility of all that we have, all that she does, needs from me, from us: a tool with which to illuminate and understand the world, but which always felt like a shield from it, too. Her eyes, coated in water and oil, beneath hooded skin, secure behind their frame of thick glass: as safe as she could be. Each morning, when much younger, I’d wake her and watch her reach for them, and push their plastic frame over the bridge of nose and her left and right ear, watch her eyelashes part and the flesh around them lift and shutter, stamen and petals, and her pupils dilate or constrict, and know the light to be limited or too much. Every time I found that part of her there, beyond the glass, and marvelled that she securely found me on the other side. No curl of hair, no softness of garment, no cherished toy or blanket soother could ever with more persuasion convince me of the brittleness and beauty of where our gratitude each day should be centred. A swell of something which tensed and still tenses¹ and inverts every fear and vulnerability you have for the people you love.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment – which occasionally spills into Saturday – to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

1. The joy of this language that you can play with the present and past form of a noun whilst using it as a verb.