My eyes are not my own.

My eyes are not my own, they belong to someone else…

I few entry’s back I wrote about how I would love to go back and talk to my great-grandmother. At that time I never gave a reason why but now my great-grandmothers presence won’t leave me alone. It is like she wants me to explain it and to comply with her I will.

I would like to be able to talk to my great-grandmother because I would like to meet the women who I have been compared to my whole life. The woman I remind everyone of. The women who’s eyes I inherited.

While I might be the spitting image of my father’s mother my eyes belong to my great-grandmother. Although she died when I was 8. I never got a chance to know her. She lived in D.R. and I lived in New York.

That fact that we lived world apart did not stop people from comparing us. As long as I can remember people have been telling me that I have the same eyes. “ Those eyes” they use to tell me “ Those eyes belong to your great-grandmother.”

I use to ask my mami why people would tell me this for I did not understand. My great-grandmother had gray-blue eyes mines are green. Plus these eyes belonged to me how could they belong to her as well? My mami being the patient women she is would laugh and then explain to me that it was not the color of the eyes that matter but what my eyes would say. She would explain to me that my great-grandmother eyes did the same thing. “When people look at you it looks as if you are talking through your eyes. It is like you have seen this world before.” She would tell me “ Your great-grandmother use to do the same thing.” At the time I was way to young to understand what my mami was explaining to me. Now that I am older and reflecting on it I understand completely.

Over the years people have stopped telling me that my eyes belong to my great-grandmother. Pero every once in a while we will run across an old family friend or someone who knew my great-grandmother and those six words magically reappear.
“ Those eyes belong to your great-grandmother” and I feel like a little girl all over again.

Now when people tell me this they are also willing to share stories with me. My mami tells me stories of how I was Mama’s favorite because for a long time I was her only great-granddaughter with light eyes. How Mama at her old age would carry me around the house singing to me telling me stories or just sitting in a rocking chair with me. How mami and papi had to fight with her to let me go when it was time to leave. How she use to say that I was “ Her baby”

My great-grandmother is not the only family member with “light” eyes her husband (my great-grandfather) had blue eyes and my grandfather on my father’s side also has blue eyes but it is her that I am compared to the most. My eyes belong to her.

“ You two” mami use to say “ You two were such a sight and old fragile women with gray hair and gray-blue eyes holding a little baby girl with jet black hair and bright green eyes, There where times when I would walk by and see the two of you sitting there staring into space and it would stop me in my tracks. You looked like a painting just sitting there rocking back and forth looking at something that only the two of you could see.”

It is stories like these that stop me in my tracks. I love hearing them but at the same time a great sadness washes over me because I feel like I missed out on getting to know her, and yet it feels like I do know her. Some where in my memory those song and stories lay she shared them with me for a reason. At time I feel her near me and I stop and listen I so desperately want to remember her, want to remember what her voice sounds like but just like the wind she comes and goes as she pleases and I am left with nothing else but to sit and wait for the next time she chooses to visit me.

My eyes are not my own they belong to someone else, they belong to my ancestors.