I loved staring contests growing up. I loved them because I was good at them. Or, maybe I loved them only as long as I was good at them, at first. At least when I could open my eyes wide and stare at a childhood friend or a sibling and keep my eyes on theirs and not blink, not laugh, not losing most of the time.

Our eyes are never still. Certain automatic mechanisms, like the "optokinetic reflex," help us feel like we look smoothly at things when, in fact, we don't and can't. When, in fact, our eyes jump every third of a second, and they jump more, harder to fix themselves on stable, stationary things. Jumping to keep stable things in place, eyes jump in their "saccades" and "micro-saccades," which correct and re-correct the saccades, the shaking that makes seeing stillness possible.

I don't remember exactly who it was that told me. Perhaps I've blocked it out. It must've been my best friend, Jarrod, or maybe my brother, Daniel, or even my sister, Emily. Whoever it was, I remember they said that it was the funny face I made that would make them laugh during our staring contests.

"What face?" I asked.

They said, "You know, that face. The one your really good at." They said, "You know what I mean."

I said that I didn't. I said I wasn't trying to make a face.

"Oh, come on, Josh," they said. "You don't have to lie about it. It's a great strategy—let one of your eyes go all lazy or let them both go googly. Who isn't going to laugh at that?"

I must've looked at whomever's mouth, a mouth gone blue with sugar or lower, a T-shirt with something cool screen-printed on it, or their teeth that were squared then pointed. I said, "I wasn't making a face." I said, "No, I mean it. I can't help it. It's how my eyes are." I wanted to break teeth or cut skin, run out the front door and up the street, but I just stood there. I looked at the orange shag carpet of Jarrod's living room floor or the yellow shag carpet of our toy room, and I just let the silence sit.

We like to say that vision is the most primary of the five senses, the one we rely on most. But, in fact, it's not: smell is. We tell ourselves that smell is for dogs and other animals; mammals and most people are supposed to rely on their eyes and their "mind's eye." And if you "make eye contact" with someone, the eyes can become "the windows to the soul," the soul that is sometimes called the "seer" or the "I." An "I" that can see someone else's "point of view" or their "outlook on life." Our Sight Unseen. An "I" that can ask or even try to answer, "Do you see what I'm saying?"

I see auras around bodies, auras that I don't mention a lot—royal purple or bright turquoise that sometimes surrounds even the clothed skin of friends and strangers, colors that also emit from bodies I try to listen to, bodies that give readings in bookstores and lectures in massive halls. I try not to watch the bright green spiked in orange. I try not to get distracted, and I never tried to figure out if there's a pattern in the coloring and shape of the auras, especially at their edges.

And I'm not sure if scientists see these auras as well or in the same light. Simon Ings, a scholar on the science of seeing, writes that according to studies, "Flesh itself lights up a little, every time a nerve fires." Bodies illuminate, bodies enlighten, bodies have bioluminescence.

I'm afraid to go to the eye doctor most of the time. Though, I suppose, it should be an innocuous or at least a familiar procedure by now. I get anxious beforehand, though. I get sweaty, rub my thumb hard against my other fingers; I get anxious that they'll tell me something else is wrong. I'm afraid that they'll look at my eyes, look at them and say that they're degrading faster than normal, degrading more than they've been.

I've been wearing glasses since I was in second grade, so I was used to the soft half-light of an eye exam room, used to it by the time I was twenty-four. An adult, shifting in the smooth tan exam chair. When asked by my new ophthalmologist's assistant, I put my chin and my forehead against the metal rests of the slit lamp. I let her pan light across my vision to help her look behind my eyes. The light inflected a pale yellow glow back through my eyes and onto my vision. I saw thin burgundy veins and bright purple fringed with explosive green. I blinked hard, trying to blink the veins and the glow out of my sight but it echoed, traced.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm trying to be quick. I know it's not pleasant. Especially for your eyes."

"It's all right," I said, putting my face back on the rest. "You have to do what you have to. It's just — I have sensitivity to bright lights. Direct light. That's why my glasses are tinted."

The assistant, Trina, said that made sense, taking a last pass with the light, then making a note in my file about the sensitivity, I guess.

"Harsh light sometimes gives me 'auras,'" I said, relaying what an optometrist told me a few years before.

She wrote more in my file. Words I couldn't see but could hear being written in the dull scratch of her pen's ballpoint.

"I also get 'tracers' and 'floaters,'" I told her. I used eye terminology to describe the way that translucent circles sometimes rose and slid in my sight like impossible fireworks. Or sometimes they'd stay in the top of my sight as floaters, like the quiet aftermath of little water glasses left there, left on my vision too long.

I told Trina what she probably already saw, something that my old optometrist diagnosed. "I'm 'legally blind without correction,'" I told her. I nodded slightly, somehow proud of how much I knew about my eyes. I watched what was left of the auras, the traces of veins and the light of the slit lamp, not wanting to watch her write facts in a file.

Eye charts are odd in a way that we usually don't talk about. Odd because ophthalmologists know better than most of us that the human eye doesn't usually "tend" to move in linear paths. When one scientist tracked the way people looked at a human face, he found that it did not scan top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Instead, it was more erratic and all over the place, more wandering than what we require for an eye chart or a page of text.

The tracked lines of sight moved all over the face with some density at the mouth, less at the top of the head where hair might part, and the most density was in two spots toward the middle of the face, two zones of dark intersection where the eyes must have been. Lines that intersected there so frequently that these two spots were the only points blacked out by the traces of the viewer's staring.

I stared at the diagram in a book on vision, the caption underneath the image called it the "Yarbuss Record," and I kept staring at those spots, those two darkened intersections that I tried to move my focus away from. I tried to follow thinner lines away from those spots to other zones of the marked face, but I couldn't. I came back to those spots and stared at them and stared until I closed the book, looked at other things—the hardwood floor, the glossy desk, the books on a shelf—all of it aura-stained from staring at black ink on book paper too long, now purple-pink in the way it stained, an imprint of the tracked line diagram of a child's face, a face built like spider-lightening with its sources in those two spots. A diagram that stained in my vision, an aura, an aftershock of something mapped onto something else, after.

People sometimes say, after they've read something I've written, that, "It's like I can see exactly what you're describing." Perhaps it's a quiet irony hiding behind my work. Perhaps it's my attempt to hide how distorted my vision is. Or maybe it's exactly what they say it is: "photographic." I've always seen things either in minute detail or in impressionistic blur. Family members, photographers, and artist friends of mine have told me that I "have the eye," or that I "have an eye for photographs."

I always thank them, wanting not to take them seriously but taking them seriously. I know how poor my vision is without glasses, but I also know that with my glasses on I've taken photographs that have been in small exhibitions, and I've designed magazines and books for small presses. I know how long my history of eye problems is, but I know how long the history of artists with "blunted sight" is as well.

Whether the way I see the world is nuanced or unreliable or both, it almost doesn't matter, or does it? What seems to matter more is that I see the world in the way that I do, a way that most sighted and most blind people do not see, and somehow that makes it feel urgent. And maybe that's somehow because, as our saying goes, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder," but I can't help hearing the word "lies" somehow scrutinizing the way I'm "blind without correction," then the word "lies" somehow scrutinizes the word "beauty," and finally, "lies" seem to be scrutinizing the whole sentence.

It wasn't long after whomever told me that I made "that funny face" that I stopped having staring contests with them or anyone else. I said no when someone asked. I said, "I just don't want to." I said something like, "No, just leave me alone about it. It's none of your business why I don't want to." I said, "Mind your own business." Eventually they stopped asking.

Eventually I started having staring contests on my own. After a shower, I would dry myself off then hang the towel over the shower rod. I would wait to get dressed and stand there, staring at the mirror, at my hairless eleven-year-old body, my armpits and my chest, my pelvis where hair was supposed to be soon. My stomach and my face. My eyes.

I looked at my eyes, stared at them, using the same rules from the game, the contest, the rules that kept me from looking away or blinking, and I was good at it again, and I didn't blink, and I didn't laugh at that face I made when I made it because eventually I always made it, because I couldn't help making it, couldn't keep my left eye from going out and "lazy" because I was looking too close and that was my right eye's job, and once I could see the laziness, once my left eye slid out of alignment with my right, then and only then was I allowed to look away. Only then was I allowed to look at the bathmat or all of our toothbrushes in their holder or my folded clothes sitting on the toilet lid. Clothes that I put on over my body then left the bathroom.

I had eye appointments with another doctor more than a decade before I saw Dr. Johnson. As a kid, I was a patient of Dr. Milton Pettapiece, a renowned pediatric ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who saw me for vision training, follow-up visits, and regular appointments throughout most of my childhood.

I started being seen by Dr. Pettapiece before I was one, my mom told me. She took me to his office on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh for years. My mom remembers a woman named Patty who worked there and who loved it when I came in for an appointment. Or at least, that's what my mom remembers. I remember tests and eye training exercises that felt more like games, games that let me miss school while I was starting first grade at Minadeo, then going into second then fourth and fifth.

Dr. Pettapiece would ask me to stare at the flat, plastic owl across the room, stare at its soft little lit-up eyes or watch a Disney movie at the far end of the room, Aladdin or The Lion King. Or, other times, he had me look at a special flashlight that he held a few feet in front of my eyes. His flashlight had small red and green lights that lit up in different combinations while he asked me, "How many of each can you see?"

With the cool rounded metal against my nose and cheeks, I stared at lines of letters on an eye chart in Dr. Johnson's office. Trina made various adjustments, sliding lenses in or out of the metal mask, flipping other lenses end over end in the phoropter, making the letters on the chart clearer and clearer still and as clear as she could until she had my new prescription exactly.

"Your vision has only changed slightly," she said, though I couldn't see her. "And it's only changed in your right eye, really," she said.

"Well, that's a relief," I said, laughing, still looking through the phoropter, not wanting to lose that clear sight, how extraordinary that exactness felt, how reassuring. "At least I'm not going even more blind," I said. "Or at least it's slowing down."

She slid the phoropter away from my face, laughing but only a little, maybe not wanting to laugh but still laughing, laughing with me.

"Could we do the test again?" I asked her.

"I'm sorry?"

"I mean, could we do the test again but without my glasses on?"

She smiled but tilted her head. "Why would you want to do that?"

"I don't know. I kind of just do. Just to see how bad I can flunk the test, I guess." I smiled, letting her see my eyes go from hers to the white square reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall.

"Sure," she said. "Just because Dr. Johnson is running a bit late at the moment."

The eye is one of only three places on the human body that cannot protect itself. With the complex network of muscles inside the eye, there are no muscles outside of it to protect its floating geometry. Only the muscles that let the eyelid close or let it squint shut and try to make the muscles and bones behind the eyebrows come down to protect the eye from some object or finger or attack. But the skull, the eyebrow, and the eyelid can't protect the eye. Nothing besides arms thrown or hands covering or a head turned can protect it, and all of those things can take too long. That's why so many self-defense courses and extreme martial arts teach so many people how to use thumbs to gouge into eyes.

I had those staring contests with myself for years, probably until I was fifteen or so. And I didn't do it only after showers; I did it anytime I was in front of the bathroom mirror. Washing my hands after using the toilet or brushing my teeth at night. Washing my face with Clean And Clear to help with my acne or after a bath at night when I tried to relax but still looked at those bug eyes, even in the dark. And I didn't do it only in front of the mirror at home; I stared at myself in any mirror I passed, in every mirror. In a friend's house when I was there playing Diddy Kong Racing or Perfect Dark. In the tile-walled bathrooms of Reizenstein Middle School or Allderdice High School. In the mirrors at the public library and in the men's room at Wendy's, and eventually I got good at doing it. I did it so quietly, quickly, without anyone noticing me do it or noticing my eyes slip. Eventually I stopped noticing that I was still doing it or knowing that it was something that everyone didn't do.

And for all the staring I did at myself, I made up for it with the staring I didn't do at others. I preferred carpeted floors or three-mile stares instead of sarcastic faces and eye contact. If I looked a friend or a girl in the face, I usually passed over their eyes, or looked at their eyes, quickly adoring the light pine green or the baby blue, and their hands or their mouth or I tried not to let them look at my eyes, at least not at my eyes staying still for too long. At least I tried not to let my eyes stay still long enough for them to be seen, for them to see what I made myself see in my eyes—the floating, the laziness, the googly eyes.

Sight is a separation: one thing seeing another, a seer and a seen. And between them, there's a space. There needs to be a space, a distance and a vantage point that lets us see and reflect, that lets us have perspective and see depth.

In the exam room, Trina smiled at me while I sat in the smooth, almost leather exam chair. She leaned toward the projector pointing at the mirror above my head. She ran her finger against a wheel on the side of it, making the letters get bigger and the lines get fewer in the reflected white square.

I smiled, staring ahead, adjusting in the chair. "What do you think I'll be able to see? A few big letters?"

"If that," she said. "You might not even be able to see the single-letter slides."

The slides in the mirror were of a single shape then another, even larger, somewhat clearer, shape.

"I wouldn't exactly be surprised if you can't read this," she said. "You might only be able to see my fingers held up close to your face."

I squinted, wanting to narrow my eyes, wanting to use my fingertips against the corners of my eyes, sliding out, making my eyelids come down and narrow, a trick I taught myself for temporarily sharpening vision, but I didn't do it. Instead, I said, "It's a D. Or an O? Or maybe it's a C? A Q? P?"

She turned the slides back farther, beyond letters into slides that most people never see. "Try this. What direction are the black bars going in? Can you see that?"

"Horizontal," I said.

"Good. And this next set?"

"Diagonal," I said, holding my arm out, slanting it to match the lines' angle.

"Right," she said. "So, bars. You can see bars without your glasses."

She told me that without glasses there's a difference of four dioptors between the sight in my eyes. My right eye is four times worse than my left, and my left eye still meets the legal limit for blindness.

"Most people have less than one dioptor of a discrepancy between their eyes," she said. "Somewhere around point five, maybe." She must've known or at least inferred that my eyes don't naturally work together. It's almost impossible to bridge that kind of discrepancy without the equalizing correction of glasses or contact lenses.

She could probably see from my file that for most of my life, I've used my eyes independently of one another: right eye for seeing near, left eye for far. Two eyes that were "mono-visual," a boy and a teenager who was probably "stereoblind," she must've figured, someone who probably had a problem with depth.

I stared at photographs long after I stopped staring at my eyes in mirrors. I could point to my right eye in a photo, slid off from center because the camera was too far away. Or, my left eye was floating off because the camera was too close. I told relatives or friends or girlfriends looking at the photos with me, "It's right there. Look," I said. "That's what I mean. That's where my eyes are off," I said. "No, it doesn't matter that you can't notice it. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there," I said. "I can see it."

I saw Dr. Pettapiece for eye tests and training, but I also saw him for appointments that followed up on something specific. He was testing my prescription and trying to help me train my two independent, "mono-visual" eyes as a set of eyes that looked in unison, in "fusion." He was trying to help me fuse my eyes, even though he said much later, after I was no longer his patient, that he doubted from early on that I would ever be able to see in fusion.

I told him that I spent years training my eyes in high school and college classrooms, trying to correct it. I tried to make my right eye work with my left to see literary terms on a chalkboard or a sociology professor's face while she lectured. Or, I made my left eye work with my right to read chapters on functionalism and structuralism, to read the way people sat in chairs next to me or postured their hands, the way a crush or a resentment could be read in someone's face somewhere between what's seen yet isn't.

After Dr. Johnson came into the exam room, he asked me to look straight at him while Trina looked on. He'd turned off the dim light in the room so it was dark behind the pin light he held in front of me. "Stare as straight as you can at the light for me, Joshua," he said, his pointer finger under my chin, raising it.

I stared at the light, or tried.

"Now follow the light with both eyes if you can."

I watched the light move.

"There," he said, more to Trina than to me. "Did you see the left eye jump back after it deviated, jumping back into place?"

"I think so," she said. "No, wait, I'm not sure I did."

Dr. Johnson sighed lightly, frustrated that she wasn't watching closely enough, I guessed. "Would it be OK with you, Joshua, if we did that just one more time?"

I blinked hard, turned my head, and rubbed my eyes. "Yeah, just give me a second," I said, trying to somehow rub the auras out. "OK, I think I could do it one more time but probably not more than that."

He thanked me for understanding, for enduring it again, and he apologized for it.

So I stared at the small circle of yellowed, almost white light and the specter of a hand holding the ophthalmoscope.

"That's great, Joshua," he said. "Just follow as best you can. I know this is probably straining your eyes, so do what you can."

I did, watching him pan the light to my right then to my left.

"There," he said. "Did you see it this time, Trina?"

"I did," she said. "That time I did."

"It was a 'saccade,' right?" I said, trying to flaunt the reading I'd been doing about the human eye. "Or a 'micro-saccade?'"

"Sort of," Dr. Johnson said. "It is a saccade, or like one."

I nodded and said oh, trying not to acknowledge the fact that I'd mispronounced the word "saccade" in the first place. I pronounced the word as if it had the same hard "a" sound as the insect, a cicada. Instead, an eye's "saccade" has the softer "aw" sound, as in "prod" or the first vowel sound in "Johnson."

In the exam room, Dr. Johnson turned off the pin light, flipped the light on in the room, and put his ophthalmoscope back in his lab coat. The wake of panning pin light stuck in streaks across my sight in thick iridescent green lines tinged with bright violet and orange. "Because your eyes sometimes switch to mono-vision without you telling them to, they also switch back on there own," he said. "They switch back in quick jumps that realign them. The eye doctor lingo for the jumps is 'saccadic pursuits.'"

In photographs that I've taken from my baby book or in the way I remember photos from that book, I see a boy with barely visible knuckles and rolls behind his elbows and knees, a boy with chubby legs and cheeks. I see a boy that looks like he's not me except for the way his cheeks bunch and round just under his eyes and skin, wrinkly at the corners of his eyes, those eyes, set there, set like the way that your eyes are the only parts of your body that don't change in size throughout your whole life.

The eyes we're born with are the eyes we keep, even if they get worse over time, even with correction by glasses or eye training, even if we've had surgeries under the skilled hands of a renowned ophthalmologist and surgeon like Dr. Pettapiece. One surgery then another on both eyes. A third surgery on my left eye then a fourth on my right, then a fifth surgery before I was seven, a fifth surgery to correct the fourth, to correct a slight, unintended over-correction. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, but how does that hold if we were born with eyes completely crossed, fixed toward the bridge of a newborn nose? Where is beauty lying then?

On my birth certificate, the doctor wrote "hazel" as my eye color. But the color hazel can mean almost anything that is some mix of bluish, greenish, or brownish. If I want to describe my eyes more exactly, more poetically, if I admired them more or wanted someone to adore them more than I do, I would say that, from the center outward, my eyes are mahogany splayed out into forest green that somehow becomes a medium azure before the cornea, but these are the colors of an iris I almost never see, even in mirrors or photographs, an iris I avoid and avoid describing.

Now, most people say that they would have never known the difference in my eyes if I hadn't told them. But I do tell them. I want them to see it sometimes, though not too much or too long. And the polite courtesy that they won't see the difference or the fact that they can't—neither matters that much to me. I know that what's "behind my eyes" is a teenager having a staring contest with himself; a newborn with a visible, visual defect; and a boy who made that funny face without trying to make that funny face. I know that it doesn't matter much what anyone says.

Seeing is believing, and I can see that there's scar tissue behind my eyes. Yet it's scar tissue that I see only when I need to imagine it: harder, tight, folded-over reddened tissue tucked against the backs of my eyes. Back there, in its stigmatizing and consoling quiet. A hard quiet that I probably had some hand in making because I don't know if the surgeries left any scars at all. I've never asked.

What I do know about my eyes is that I have the weighted luxury of being able to put my glasses on when the world is too fuzzy, indecipherably mixed through my eyes "without correction," and likewise, I can take off my glasses and let strangers walking down the street become the most decadent masses of peach and chestnut and navy blue. City blocks lose their tightness and become too loose to be fully urban.

I can exchange shape and edges and details for shade and hue and light. The trade-off for this pseudo-dual citizenship is that I can't completely leave either the world of the seeing or the world of the blind, and I can't fully enter them either. It's a kind of amnesty that only sometimes feels like being stuck. More often than not, my vision feels like its own country, its own way of knowing that is marked and made by its moving.