Cartoon Eyes

It was a cool, bright spring morning. I was jogging around Washington Park at a good clip. I felt loose, powerful. Capable of cruising around the 2 in a half-mile loop with ease. I passed over the ground lightly, carrying myself in joint and joy. A clear euphoric elation spread over me. The world was mine, and I was the world’s.

I took in everything around me, a thousand panes of happy existence. There were mansions with porch dwellers and laughter, cookouts, volleyball games, people reading, slacklining, playing jazz. Couples were having romantic lunches, groups of the ancient and finely coined sipping chilled wine in Adirondack islands dotted across the grand field. Babies screamed glee as their pudgy little legs finally obeyed, and they could fly across the once unmastered land. Dogs ripped across the grass after all manner of flung toys. The world was good and saturated.

I pushed myself up a hill on the east side. The effect of my pace was creeping through my legs and into my lower back. I looked to my left to gain wonder and power from the snow-topped peaks that towered over everything. Even here in the heart of the metropolis, those grand edifices brought a sense of wanderlust so strong I divulged for the next quarter mile into a deep state of childlike imagination where I was a powerful beast of vast potential. I sprinted through the woods and over rocks. Glided effortlessly over patches of slushy snow. Then I was back at the park, my legs threatening to turn to jelly if I stopped.

Nearly involuntarily, I caught a glimpse of a house I had never seen nestled between two I could certainly draw up a rough rendition of. I doubled back. It had double-rounded enclosed porches with heavy wood banisters and a sharp roof typical to the neighborhood. A small stained-glass attic window settled in the dead center, glowed with luminescent sentience. As if playing a crude joke, the owner had nailed a pair of large cartoon eyes above the roof of the second-story porch so the house could look out over the park.

I slowed down, walking in a big circle as I examined the bothersome detail. They had never been there before, I was sure. I was breathing hard, trying to slow my heart as I wound slowly to a fluid stance. The cartoon eyes wrought into place vacantly jeered out over the park. My body quaked. I puzzled over the eyes, trying to remember if I had ever seen them before. Surely, I would have remembered. I was radiating with heat and bewilderment. The eyes settled uneasily on me, watching but never participating in the world they were forced to preside over.

I jogged slowly back to the stoplight. The eyes had zapped me of my bliss. My body was heavy lead rising to untouchable temperatures in the brutal Denver sun. Up this high, you can’t get away. Beware the snow burn, the heat, the intense blinding light of the mile high. Way up here, the sky bores down in a flat plane of dense blue. You could reach up, tear a little hole, and see that the night sky hides just behind. The stars are always near. Green light.

My foot hovered mid-step. Every blink brought back the cartoon eyes. How had I, in all this time, missed such a bizarre detail? How had it slinked past me day after day? A car wanting to turn honked at me. I stepped into the intersection in a daze, nearly running hip to bumper with the impatient driver. He flicked me off, called me a name, and burned rubber to show his disdain.

Back at my apartment, I said hello to my dog and sunk deeply into a cool shower. I got clean for the first time this year. It was the first day of blistering heat. The first day where, the cold water tenderly eased me. I forgot about the eyes. I forgot about the uneasy detail. The rest of my day was spent reading on my porch, taking my dog for leisurely strolls around the neighborhood, eating whatever food was around the house. At night, I cozied up in my favorite red velvet armchair with a book of obscure flash fiction and a desire to deepen my heart.

But I found myself distracted. The stories couldn’t hold me, and though I sought to craft a well-defined and intelligent me, I felt loose and stupid.

The eyes were bothering me. They were just a joke, a funny jest transforming inanimate to animate to make the world a little less cold, but the eyes seemed like such a pronounced detail of the neighborhood that their subtly bothered me. Their ability to sneak up on me in a place I felt I knew well bothered me.

Had I been distracted? Did I really know the place I lived at all? As I pondered, I looked at the art covering every inch of bare wall between my bookshelves. My favorite one, a simple piece of artboard with a mockup of fake record cover art. It had a distorted face of a man painted in blue and pink with lettering that said “Funky Side Down,”… “Funny,”… “Funny.”

It says, “Funny Side Down.”

I sat up in my chair and stared at that painting. It had been on my wall for years. It had always said “Funky Side Down,” but now I see it says “Funny Side Down.” My heart raced out of my chest. How much do I not see? How much of my life is false because of me? Was my dog really brown, or did I just hope she was? Was I an intelligent and kind person full of potential, or did I tell myself these things to abolish the disappointment of reality? Had I earned the right to be a recorder of life when such glaring details skirted past me? Was I removed?

Late into the night, I tore through my apartment, looking for more missed details. The map on my wall was not in English but in German. The soap in my shower was not patchouli but sandalwood. My coffee beans were roasted in Mexico, not New Mexico. So many details slipped by. So many nuances missed. Repetition and familiarity had robbed me of experience. I nearly cried as the shock of my seclusion from my own life overwhelmed me.

I had been looking at my life with cartoon eyes, not the bulbous orbs of fine nerves that, over billions of years, had given me the ability to see clearly and deeply. They had failed me, or I had failed them. Whichever one of us sees first has failed. The world was not as I made it. It was existing just fine without me. I was here to experience it as it was not, as how I hoped it would be. All the times I had told myself that reality is what I make it were delusional. Reality is not what it seems. Your life is not what it seems. Careful. Reality is changing. Reality is shifting. If you don’t take notice, it will morph and evolve until you are no longer part of it but a passive participant. You may wake up one day and realize your whole life is strange to you.