Sometimes I think there are worms in my eyes.
I imagine them silvery and warm and moist up there, with a hundred little ringed body segments. I blink when I wake up and rub my sleep-heavy eyes. I can feel them twist and squirm around under my eyelids as I gently squish them beneath my fist. After all, I’ve woken them up, too. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m wrong and they’re not worms. I think maybe they’re actually spiders or caterpillars or ants, because every so often I think I feel tiny little legs.
(But I’m reasonably sure that they’re worms.)
I’m always sure that the worms live in my left eye, specifically. I feel them curling up in the corner of my eye, just there. I can’t help but hope that they’re cozy even as I wonder if they’re snacking away at my retina or slurping up my conjunctiva.
Someday, I’ll look in the mirror and see one lounging in my iris, swimming in that blue-green lazy river of my eyeball. I imagine we’d make eye contact, and that it would be slightly awkward. An interloper caught in headlights. The worm would be embarrassed for a moment and then indignant. It’s had a long day. The worm needs to relax too.
(I can’t argue there.)
I wonder if I’ll look up one day and realize that my vision is split down the middle.
My right eye will be normal. When I look through it, I’ll see what I normally see. I’ll see the shadows under my eyes, compulsively comb my hair until it falls just right, feel the need to suck my stomach in when I look at myself.
I’m not quite sure what the left eye full of worms will see. Maybe it will hunger for the crumbs left on the dirty dishes that pile up on my desk or the rest of my half-eaten protein bar. Want to suck the last bit of fluorescent orange Dorito dust out from underneath my fingernails. Maybe it will see the muddy ground left from the rain last night and long to burrow deep down in the damp red earth, to let the filth get caked in my hair.
Maybe it will look around at the world and decide it’s time for a vacation, time to take a little break from telling me what to see.
They deserve it.
I imagine the worms then crawling up and out of my left eye one night while I am asleep. They wave goodbye to their neighbors, the eyelash mites, on their way out. (They make the mites promise to water their plants twice a day while they’re out of town.)
And I wake up alone.
There is no one to make eye contact with when I look at myself in the fogged up mirror after my morning shower and no one to blame for how I eye up the terrible dining hall pizza, drenched in grease and incubated beneath heat lamps.
No one to whisper to me it’s okay to hunger like I do, to want to consume.
And I know the eyelash mites are still there, snacking on my dead skin cells and washing them down with oil fresh from my pores. I know there are trillions of bacteria living in the pit of my stomach and a whole world of microbes in the lint of my belly button. I know that I am never really alone when I am by myself, but I nevertheless find myself missing the worms.
So I set the table and I wait patiently for my friends to come home. Leave the porch light on so they know they’re welcome anytime. Picture opening the doors to see their smiling faces and an exasperated but caring look in their eyes as they scold me for not taking care of myself while they were away.
I like to imagine all of this about my worms, but I know that most worms don’t have eyes.
Somehow, mine still see me.
