The Script on the Backs of My Eyelids

I have noticed recently that the backs of my eyelids are covered in a small script only visible under certain levels of ambient light. Too bright a light, for instance, the rays of an angry summer sun brutally searing the earth as if to remind it of the foolishness of trying to escape the crushing gravity of its bulk by cowardly circling about to postpone the moment of its ultimate capture like the stare of a middle school bully casting palpable heat upon the back of the neck of a small, unathletic boy who accidentally sneezed on him while he was holding his feet doing sit-ups in gym class while they are seated across the room from each other in history class learning the particularities of war atrocities which only inspire the bully to conceive of ever more terrible punishments and for the small boy to imagine every more terrible consequences for his ill-timed nasal ejaculation. At this sort of intensity of light the script on the back of my eyelids becomes washed out and impossible to read as you might well expect. Too dark and the figures are strangled into intangibility. Somewhere in between, say, at the luminosity of a dinner table with two candles burned down to a suitable romantic level and the screen of one iphone covered by a thumb frantically trying to find the best method of opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew, the texts become imminently readable, although it took me a very long time to realize this because there are very different texts written on the back of each eyelid and so when I previously closed my eyes at just the right level of luminosity the two writings were superimposed upon each other and looked just like the usual closed-eye murk.

It was only when I happened to wink at a colleague I was about to become romantically involved with over an unopened bottle of wine, that I suddenly happened to notice the writing and immediately became so utterly engrossed in its reading that I held the wink far longer than was urbane and at such an angle (in order to catch just the right amount of candle light) that my face more nearly resembled not someone who was experiencing a strange involuntary facial tick, but instead someone who was inexpertly pretending to have such a tick and thus being in very poor taste and particularly offensive to people with tardive dyskinesia like her brother, with whom she was estranged but still cared very deeply about, and that curious static wink I displayed was just the same expression as the one she had last seen on the face of her brother, some five years ago. What's more, I knew all about her brother, his condition and the haunting parting glance he had left her with because just yesterday she had spilled it all to me during a tearful heart-to-heart chat which had grown about the conversational nucleus of my having commented upon the sight of a small dog walking purposefully down the street on its own saying, "There goes a true patriot."

On either eyelid the scripts are very different, on the left detailed descriptions of "paranoid delusions" in twenty four subjects (and yeah it makes a big deal about putting the quotes around "paranoid delusions" every time and is so overtly skeptical about them that it practically exalts each subject as a practitioner of  Sherlock Holmesian levels of deduction and insight) and on the right the instructions to an old espresso machine with coffee stains all over everything. So given the content it was pretty obvious how it got there.