It's an astoundingly gorgeous Autumn afternoon and a friend comes out with Stan and me to take a bunch of pictures of us to use for engagement/wedding stuff/whatever. The experience of having our picture taken together is an unusual one for us- normally I am the photographer. There is a lot of laughing, a bit of crying (me), and much goofing around. We're nervous in front of the camera, so we try to gain confidence by losing ourselves in humor. We try to make nice faces, but each nice face necessitates a ridiculous one to counter it and the camera keeps capturing those in-betweens. We pose next to a pond, in a field, tête-à-tête lying in a pile of leaves. We sit together under a tree, the two of us in a pool of golden sunlight surrounded by shadow. We put our hands to the earth, touch the leaves and seeds and pine cones blanketing the lawn around us. We wonder, what if we had eyes at the tips of our pinky fingers? How would our brains process the additional perspective? A breeze stirs, the afternoon light ripples and shimmers under our tree. A leaf falls near my left knee, then another. What if we looked around through our pinky eyeballs and our eyeball eyeballs at the same time? How would the resulting image composite appear to us? We're no longer self-conscious, there is no camera. We are the only ones here. We hold our pinkies out at one another looking, laughing. We are the only people, just the two of us.
What would we see if we held our hands up to our faces, looked ourselves directly in the eyes?
