How I realised my worst nightmare

I have a confession to make.  I am now in my mid twenties and I never meet anyone’s eyes.  It does cause me trouble but not always in an obvious way.   Now I know it’s an obvious tag that there is something very wrong with me!  But to do it is unpleasant for me, so I’ve put it in the too-hard basket for now, even if it is necessary

A little while back I went for a short exchange to Japan to study at a private college.  I know I’m awkward but I didn’t worry too much – as a foreign exchange student it’s a given that I’m not going to fit in, I reasoned.  Japanese people, even young people tend to be polite and hospitable no matter what they think of you anyway.

My story starts in a culture education cooking class.  I was paired with an energetic girl named Kei and her four friends, who was happy to chatter away about her weekend escapades as she showed me how to prepare Japanese omelette.  My Japanese is sketchy at best, but being flattered by the genuine friendliness this girl was showing, I did my best to act attentive, with a well timed “ah, sou!”  and a technique I call ‘flickering.’

“Flickering” is how I attempt to convince people I’m actually looking at them, and it works best when you are doing something else while talking to someone, as Kei and I were.  To ‘flicker’ you keep your eyes on the task at hand, or straight ahead.  Then every so often, you ‘flick’ your eyes up, hitting the person’s face for a millisecond.  It says to them, “I’m listening to you, really, but I want to concentrate on my omelette/homework/knitting as well.”  If you’re not doing anything, you just look like you’re thinking really hard.

After a few flickers, Kei suddenly went quiet.  I flickered again, for a bit longer to see what was wrong with the girl and she went berserk.  She began jumping up and down, screaming “I don’t believe it!  They’re BLUE!!!”

Kei’s friends demanded to know what the problem was, and she began talking very fast – I only got the words “blue eyes…she actually has…can you believe it?”

You’d better believe it.  These girls had never seen someone with naturally blue eyes before.

They couldn’t be convinced without some solid proof, naturally.  So Kei grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around to face these six hazel lasers ready to bore into my retina.

What was I feeling right then?  Somewhere at the intersection between molestation street and white hot metal avenue.  Six faces.  Screaming, laughing, emoting more than I usually see in a whole year.  It was too much.  I wanted to avert my eyes but that would raise more questions I don’t have the Japanese vocab to answer

But we weren’t done.  The rest of the class – including some other Australian students – were a little confused as to what made Kei’s table lose the plot and me half hyperventilate, half laugh like a 14 year old boy at a lingerie football match.  Somehow word got out that they had an ‘aoi’ on their hands, so the other 24 students in the class had to see it for them selves.  I was forced into a chair, with no option than to allow myself to be visually gang banged by these kids.

After a few minutes of this violation, the teacher managed to get everyone back on task – after taking a few close up pictures of yours truly on their phones to prove their discovery to their friends. I returned to my omelette despite wanting to plunge my brain into a bucket full of ice, while an exhausted Kei explained to me that she had seen pictures of models with blue eyes, but assumed that they were just contacts.  Blue eyes were considered to be a rare genetic anomaly.

It wasn’t all bad in the end.  I made some new friends, even if they were hoping I had some blue eyed male friends I could set them up with.  Plus I was told that the close up pictures of my wide, petrified periwinkle eye on people’s phones caused quite the sensation over dinner tables in this smallish Japanese community.

There are some situations in which eye contact is unavoidable.  So I started wondering if I couldn’t test my limits a little.  Maybe I should start flickering for a bit longer.  After all, if there’s one thing this incident has taught me, it’s that I never know when I might need it.