Prompt: Please choose: Physical qualities of your body that you put societal value on or societal value gets put on you (Great hair/clear skin/high nose/long legs/beautiful hands/height, etc) or A time when you related or lived a parallel life with a non human creature (in person of in a book or movie).
“Your eyes are so blue!”
“Your eyes are so beautiful!”
“Your blue eyes are so pretty!”
These are all things I grew up hearing when I was younger. This typically happened when my mother and I would be walking through the parking lot to the grocery store, and a stranger would stop us as we passed by. Within a few minutes of conversing with this stranger, I would realize that my mother knew this person and had simply not seen them in a long time. The stranger would look from my mother to me, then back to my mother and ask “Is this your baby? She looks just like you! And those beautiful blue eyes!” I always thought it weird that some stranger would call my eyes beautiful, but my mother claimed it was impolite not to say thank you, so my reply would always be a quiet “Thank you.” before I hid behind my mother once more. This was not a rare occurrence when I was a child. In fact, it happened almost every time we went into town for something, maybe that was because my parents had spent their whole lives in the area and knew almost everyone. While I never welcomed these comments on my eyes from strangers, I did notice when they stopped coming.
When I started getting a little older, and no longer hid behind my mother’s legs, people stopped commenting on my eyes. I believe it has something to do with the fact that I had to start wearing glasses, cursed with bad eyesight by my family’s genetics. Once the glasses were put on my face, no one even seemed to notice what color my eyes were anymore. In fact, in some instances where I told people that I had blue eyes they didn’t believe me until I took my glasses off for them to see. It never made sense to me how something as simple as glasses could change the way someone saw me so much. It's just glasses, you can see through them, that’s kind of the whole point of them. Yet, no one bothered once I put them on.
I remember another instance a few years after I got my glasses, I asked my parents to let me try contacts. The point of the contacts was not so people could see my “beautiful blue eyes”, but simply to keep my glasses from breaking during the various sports I played then. I soon learned that contacts were not for me. I hated anything being near my eye, including my own finger. Of course, this made it impossible for me to actually get the contacts in my eyes myself. I remember the first day I wore them to school, my father had to hold me down while my mother helped me put them in. That is a memory that makes my eyes water just thinking about it. The entire day, my eyes burned, and people came up to me all day asking if I was ok because it looked like I had been crying. I decided that would be the last time I ever wore contacts. A decision my parents disagreed with. I remember my dad telling me, “You should wear the contacts more. I love seeing your pretty blue eyes!”
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