One of my eyeballs popped out and we couldn’t fit it back in, so I’ve been carrying it around in my pocket, in the grip of my hand. I didn’t realize how linty it gets in there.

It’s really messed up my perception, seeing two disparate images at once. I can’t make sense of space or see peripherally. Sometimes I hold the left eye out, level with my head, to try to amend the situation, but it’s fun to experiment by moving it around, seeing the road ahead from new perspectives, up high, down low, what life looks like from my hip. I can even peer backwards, though that often makes me trip. It’s a weird sensation, like rubbing your belly and patting your head in opposite directions. When I keep the severed eye in the dark, in my pitch-black pocket, and look up at the blinding white light of the sun with my still connected right optic, I see a perfect grey gradient. It’s given me a whole other point-of-view.

I’m always thinking about one’s positionality now. In fact, many people like trying on my eye. They pop out one of their own and push my left guy in. Whoa, they say, as they see from my lens. I know, I say, as I look at their one brown iris, one blue. So, this is how Darrell sees the world. Yup, I say. Kind of fuzzy. Have you checked your prescription? Huh, I say, thinking about all the times I’m constantly squinting. I guess, I just thought the world looked a little blurry.

Meanwhile, I keep ripping my skin. There’s a loose flap on my hand, so I pull it back and a whole chunk comes off, bleeding for a bit, maybe scabbing over in a day or two. But no matter, my material being will regenerate, grow new layers—just like a lizard! One way or another, my body’s surface is always shedding, replacing itself, like that old ship of Theseus. It makes me question who I really am.

My friends say my body is a portal to another dimension—to heaven! —and this whole popped eyeball business has them speculating about how else we can play with it. Can we numb both my legs and then tie bricks to my feet, see if I still walk straight? Can we shave off all my hair and plant it, find out if a new me sprouts in the garden? The craziest idea involves blowing up the loose left eyeball, sticking a needle and pumping helium in, so it floats through the sky like a balloon. I’m a little hesitant, but they sell me on how cool it would be to look down on our town from a true bird’s eye view, fly overhead like a blimp, surveilling everyone and advertising myself. I counter: What about making it inflatable and using it as a pool toy, floating around and seeing the depths of the ocean? Or rolling it around on the ground like a marble, looking close-up at all the debris too miniscule for us to notice from 5-6 feet high? Or putting a string around it and making it yo-yo! Anything but the blimp idea. No, they say. Giant flying eye in the sky it is. Okay, I sigh. I rip off a layer of my thigh’s epidermis, feeling all kinds of anxious.

So, they buy a helium tank, my friends, and as they inflate my loose eyeball outside our house’s garage, it grows giant, a sphere so large my whole body could fit in. The pupil’s all dilated like it’s in love with whatever’s next to it: the parked mini-van, the single-story house, the telephone poles with birds sitting on them. But all this light is making me nauseous. My friends say the pupil still connected to my head is shrinking by comparison, now the size of a grain of sand. The helium-boosted eyeball starts making squeaky noises and puss flows out the sides. I feel a burning sensation. And then before I know it, my perspective lifts off.

My friends cheer as the blimp eye begins floating through the sky and I look down at the country, like an airplane on ecstasy. The land is so flat and angular. And yet, everything’s distorted: I can see wider than a fish. I can see the roundness of the planet. And my friends and I: there we are, we’re ants. I feel myself ascending higher and higher and the further my eye is separated from my head, the further the distance from the rest of my body, the more I realize I’m imprisoned by this miniscule shape I take, that of homo sapiens.

I don’t think. It’s instinctual: I need to shed this skin. My form’s imprisoning! I dig my nails deep, deep, and rip off as many of the scabs as I can. I’m a pool of blood, flowing out like lava, all muscles and skeleton. The screams of my friends get drowned out over the peaceful chirps of birds in the sky, the sound of rushing wind, of Earth from up above. I’m just a giant floating eye now, traveling across rural-to-urban landscapes. I reach the Empire State Building and I can feel my wide anxious eye try to avert its tip. Reroute, move against the air currents! But it’s too late— I pop

particle bits ash bugs and rain invisibly existing flickering I’m everywhere I’m air I settle molecules hovering over a pond I feel the condensation gas oxygen pass through me ricochet onto the lake the waves and rings collide till the water is still no longer a constant ripple moving, breathlessly.