It started with an irritation in my left eye, as if I had a grain of sand stuck under the lid. I looked in the mirror, pulled the skin down, but saw nothing. Just a little redness.
The doctor said it was stress. "Take some drops, rest your eyes," he told me without even looking up from his tablet.
That night, though, the irritation turned into pressure. I felt something pushing from inside the eyeball, a fluid, slimy movement. I rushed to the bathroom and switched on the blinding light. I stared at myself in the mirror, holding my eye wide open with my fingers.
For a second, I saw nothing. Then I blinked.
My eyelids closed and opened normally. But an instant after the skin lifted, a transparent, yellowish membrane slid horizontally across my eye, from right to left. It was quick, glassy, like the nictitating membrane of a reptile.
I stood petrified. I did it again. I closed my eyes, opened them. *Zic.* The membrane snapped across again. And this time, I heard a thought that wasn't mine, a thin voice resonating directly in my cerebral cortex: "Finally, the lens is clean."
I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. I don't know what I wanted to do. Maybe gouge out my eye, maybe just hurt that thing. But when I pointed the blade toward the mirror, my right hand froze in midair. It wasn't paralysis. It was as if someone had taken over the electrical wiring of my muscles.
My left hand, instead, rose slowly and began to stroke my cheek with a repulsive tenderness.
I looked at my reflection again. The yellow membrane no longer retracted. It stayed there, fixed, covering my iris. And behind that membrane, my pupil began to change, stretching vertically into a deep, black slit.
"Don't fight," the voice whispered in my head. "We were here long before you were born. We were only asleep in your DNA. Now we are hungry for light."
Now I'm sitting in the dark. I can't close my eyes, because the membrane holds them open. I see things I shouldn't see: the heat radiating from the walls, the trails of energy left by insects flying around the room.
And I see you. Yes, you, the one reading this.
Do you feel that slight itch at the corner of your eye? Don't rub it. Don't look in the mirror. Because if you do, you might realize that your lens has just finished cleaning itself too.
Do you still feel "alone" inside your skin?