I don’t know exactly when my parents first realized there was something different about my eyes. All I know is that I was still very little, only a few months old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I imagine it happened during one of those rituals that accompany every newborn. A relative leans over the crib, looks at the baby with the confidence of an expert, and begins taking inventory of the family resemblances: the nose is entirely the father’s, the ears are the mother’s, the chin belongs to the grandmother, the eyebrows to the uncle. Then, inevitably, comes the moment of the eyes. What color will they be? Who do they look like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only, just as that gaze was trying to meet mine, my eyes had absolutely no intention of staying still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more someone tried to look at me, the more they started darting from one side to the other, incredibly fast, from right to left and back again, as if my very young optic nerve had decided that seeing everything perfectly in focus wasn’t really such a necessity after all. In fact, perhaps blurring the world was actually an excellent way to make certain faces a little less unsettling. Or, at the very least, more bearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that frightened my parents quite a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The medical visits began. Examinations, specialists. Everyone had a different theory and, judging from the stories I’ve been told, it seemed as though the doctors were competing to imagine the worst possible scenario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“She has damage to her optic nerve.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“She needs neck surgery.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“She’ll be blind before she’s three.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, though, the diagnosis arrived: nystagmus<\/strong>. That’s the name of the involuntary movement that still makes my eyes tremble today. There wasn’t really anything to do except wear glasses and undergo regular check-ups. As for the cause, no one ever managed to identify it. Perhaps a trauma before birth. Perhaps during delivery. Perhaps shortly afterward. Or perhaps none of those things. Quite simply, nobody knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I, however, always had my own theory, although I’m convinced no doctor has ever seriously considered the effect certain faces can have on someone who has only just entered the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My father, on the other hand, had convinced himself it was his fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever I asked him why my eyes moved so quickly, he always told me the same story. He said that, as a baby, I had an incredibly hard time falling asleep and that, exhausted, he would grab my cradle and rock it with an enthusiasm that today we would probably describe as excessive. He had convinced himself that he was the one who had caused that constant movement of my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a child I listened to that story, but it never sounded convincing to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I much preferred thinking it was all the dreams’ fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had discovered that during the REM phase<\/strong>\u2014Rapid Eye Movements\u2014the eyes move quickly while we dream. So I came up with a theory of my own: I was just like everyone else, except that I liked dreaming even while I was awake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As time went by, I stopped wondering where my nystagmus came from. I realized that some questions have no answer and that, in the end, they don’t even need one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I grew up with it. I learned to live with eyesight that, every now and then, decides to do its own thing and that I can never fully control. And perhaps that’s also why it has never had control over me\u2014I mean my eyesight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I think about it, I believe it has actually been a stroke of luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, seeing has never been an automatic gesture. It has always been something that required attention. An action to interpret even before carrying it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And perhaps for that very reason, as I grew up, I began to suspect that sight is the most overbearing sense we possess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We always give it more credit than it deserves. If we can’t see something, we struggle to believe it exists. If we do see it, we’re convinced we’ve already understood it. But reality is often much broader and deeper than our field of vision, and whether we realize it or not, it keeps reaching us through very different paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some time ago, I noticed one of the many curious things about the Italian language. I realized that there is a verb that can be used to talk about every sense except one\u2014and can you guess which one? Yes, sight itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m talking about the verb sentire<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can say we’ve “heard<\/em> a noise.” But we also say, “Do you smell this perfume?<\/em>“\u2014literally, “Do you feel this perfume?<\/em>” Or, “Taste this, see how it tastes just like apricot,<\/em>” or again, “Have you felt how soft it is?<\/em>” They are all sensations that, if you think about it, are a little uncertain, personal, subjective\u2014things you can only be sure of if you truly trust yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, as it happens, sentire<\/em> is also the verb we use when we talk about emotions or inner feelings: “Today I feel happy.<\/em>” “I feel sad.<\/em>” “I feel at home.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I don’t mean to play the role of a linguistic detective, especially since I have no certainty that this is anything more than a simple philological coincidence. But I like to think it isn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like to think that this word preserves a deeper truth: that before we even look at the world, we feel it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take hearing, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s the sense that gives me the impression of holding our oldest memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes me back to when I was so small that I could fit entirely on someone’s chest while they told me bedtime stories, back to when words didn’t yet have a meaning\u2014or at least not the meaning they have today. There was only this voice blending with the slow, rhythmic sound of a heart that had no desire to be anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s almost as though, even before we understand what is being said to us, we learn to recognize the people who make us feel safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps that’s where we truly begin to know other people. Not so much through what they say, but through the way their presence sounds to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Smell, on the other hand, is another form of memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something profoundly ill-mannered about it. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t introduce itself. It doesn’t ask permission. It simply arrives. And, within a single instant, it takes us somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve become convinced that my sense of smell becomes sharper in summer\u2014perhaps because I’m finally free from colds. The smell of the sea and the scent of the sand early in the morning. Riding my bicycle with my knees, inevitably, scraped on freshly cut grass. The smell of my grandmother’s sunscreen. The unmistakable scent of that fine dust covering pine nuts just pulled from a pine cone, ready to be cracked open with the heaviest stone in the garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s strange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I close my eyes, those moments don’t even feel like memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They feel as though they’re still resting on the tip of my nose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there’s touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My elementary school teacher used to say that it lives in our fingertips. And yet, over time, I’ve become convinced that a hand tells us much more than what it touches. From a caress in the hollow of the knee, from the gentleness with which someone takes hold of your arm, even from the way they intertwine their fingers with yours, I believe it’s possible to sense every step that brought them to that moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the collision of particles. Millions of microscopic collisions happening without us even noticing. A tiny explosion that, however much we try to control it, remains an inevitable phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A little like what happened that evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were both seventeen years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a certain point, that song started playing. His favorite. I think, from that moment on, mine too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He looked at me and, without giving me time to imagine what he was about to do, simply said,<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Come on, let’s dance.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He took my hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was such a quick gesture that I barely realized it had happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even today, when I think back to it, I still wonder how it was possible that, inside my hand enclosed in his, I understood the magnitude of the Big Bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He made his way through the crowd with absolutely no intention of letting go of my hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I followed him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t show it\u2014after all, I was still seventeen\u2014but inside I was smiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We reached the middle of the room and, all of a sudden, I had the feeling that the world had changed size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were incredibly close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything else was impossibly far away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As though an invisible circle had opened around us. As though the people, the animals, the wind, the tides\u2014even time itself\u2014had held their breath for a single instant just to watch two teenagers holding hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then he looked at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I’d like to tell you what I was thinking at that moment, but the truth is that I could no longer think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because while that fire was blazing inside the clasp of our young hands, the rest of my body became soft, gentle, dazed, and I simply couldn’t understand anything anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If someone had asked me, I don’t think I would even have been able to remember who I had been five minutes earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That in that hand I was holding everything I wanted most in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened afterward?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’d say that’s a matter of taste\u2014which, poor thing, is perhaps the most misunderstood of all the senses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ve been taught that its purpose is to distinguish sweet from bitter, salty from sour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that seems to me to be a terribly limiting definition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After all, nobody tastes the world from a distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To do that, you have to move closer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You have to give up the distance that protects us from other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You have to accept that, at least for a moment, your own breath may disappear and blend with the breath of the person standing in front of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe that’s why it seems to me to be the most intimate sense we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a kiss that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that sensation that had begun in my hand quickly spread through the rest of my body, and I think that, for a second, my brain felt something like a tickle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps an endlessly long dizziness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A plunge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A leap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A dive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I couldn’t say how long it lasted, and I can’t say for certain what it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while it was happening, my eyes were closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I think that’s the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a kiss, it always makes a difference whether our eyes are open or closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that moment, it felt as though I recognized him through that wonderful taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it felt as though I recognized myself a little, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long before my eyes managed to bring him properly into focus, I already knew everything about us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, these little stories, together with many others, make me think that it can’t be a coincidence that in Italian we use the verb sentire<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so I wonder what the point is of having five senses if we keep trusting almost exclusively the one that sees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What good is perfect eyesight if I can recognize your voice even before I understand what you’re saying?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What use are perfect vision and twenty-twenty eyesight if a scent can bring me back to someone who hasn’t even walked into the room?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And why should I believe that reality ends where my eyes can reach, when, with my eyes closed, I always know how to find your hand?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there’s one thing my eyesight has taught me, I have to admit, it’s how beautiful it can sometimes be to close your eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that perhaps the most human way of encountering the world isn’t to look at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s to feel<\/strong> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ilaria Serpi<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know exactly when my parents first realized there was something different about my eyes. All I know is that I was still very little, only a few months old. I imagine it happened during one of those rituals that accompany every newborn. A relative leans over the crib, looks at the baby with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":8112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n