The Eye Deal

I think some of the most important moments in your life, the ones that shaped who you are as a person, were moments when you did something for the first time.
Your first day of school. Your first friend. Your first enemy. The first birthday you celebrated not with your family, but with someone you were dating. The first time you came around the final curve, overtook the anchor runner from the outside, and broke the finish tape. The first time you discovered aerial silks.
Everyone has first experiences like that, moments that changed who you would later become, though sometimes you may hesitate over whether to enter them into the official history of your life, or quietly erase them and pretend they never happened at all.

In the manga Death Note, there is a system called the Shinigami Eye Deal: a contract in which a person gives up half of their remaining lifespan in exchange for eyes that can see what would normally be invisible: other people’s names and lifespans.
In ordinary life, no transaction quite that blatant takes place. Still, it seems to me that whenever a person experiences something for the first time, they are doing something surprisingly similar. They offer up a small portion of the life they have left for the sake of a new experience, and in return, little by little, they buy themselves eyes with which they can see things they could not see before. (*1)

For example, ever since I experienced aerial silks, I have no longer been able to see a high ceiling as merely a high ceiling, a feeling I suspect many aerialists will understand.
When I enter a building with an atrium, my eyes automatically measure the height before anything else. I look at the beams, and before thought has even caught up, my eyes are already calculating load, rigging, and safety management, automatically catching the position and angle of the lights. They pick up the possibility of hanging fabric there. I have acquired eyes that can no longer even see the ceiling of my own home in quite the same way. (*2)
The same goes for when I watch someone spin. Before, I might have only thought that they were just spinning beautifully. Now my eyes automatically catch where the axis is, how the gaze moves, even how the floor, the walls, and the lights must be flowing through that person’s field of vision.
This feels less like knowledge than like a new set of eyes. Life, I think, is a journey of accumulating first experiences and collecting eyes of this kind.

—

Yet once you have acquired a pair of eyes, it is extremely difficult to throw them away by choice, and new eyes can also become cursed eyes.

First of all, an eye that has become too sharp can immediately become a curse.
Once you have seen an overwhelming height with your own eyes and felt the force of its gravity, as in performing aerial on an 80-foot (25-meter) high stage, everything afterward in your life will continue to be measured against that height. The troublesome thing is that it is none other than your own eyes that make the world appear that way. As an observer, everything in this world is ultimately a matter of perspective, and in the end, the way you see the world is the world you have to live in. There is no escaping your own eyes.

And when you acquire new eyes, you gain one world, but you also lose one world you used to have. I lost the right to see a high ceiling as merely a ceiling. I lost the right to see a rotating body as merely a body. I acquired eyes for which the meanings of space and fabric had changed.
Taken to its extreme, perhaps we begin to see the structure of locks in tangled laundry, read the possibility of a trick in the movement of a curtain, and glimpse the rebound of silks after a drop in the way the handles of a shopping bag bite into our fingers. Things that once meant nothing begin to look back at us bearing the question: Could this be rigged? Could this be wrapped? Could this be climbed? The world divides itself into things that can be climbed and things that cannot. Or, more precisely, it becomes filled almost entirely with things that should not be climbed but look climbable, and things that look climbable but should not be climbed.

I have not (at least not yet) had the experience of having the world invaded quite that far by my aerialist’s eyes. But there are times when, because you have acquired a certain pair of eyes, the paper-thinness of reality in all sorts of places, something people without those eyes strangely fail to notice, shatters into fragments and pierces you like splinters of glass. Small dissonances you would have to look away from in order to live anything resembling a normal social life are magnified by those cursed eyes like a lens, until they can no longer be ignored and slowly begin to corner you.
But there is salvation in this too: those same eyes can magnify the seemingly insignificant beautiful things you encounter in life.
The greatest example of this is meeting companions with whom you can share the same eye deal. Together, through those eyes, we can experience the depth and gentleness of the world in things that look like nothing at all: the ordinary night sky we looked up at while lying side by side on a rooftop, the station platform where we waited for the last train, or a day when the wind blew so fiercely it seemed to stop our breath — each of them glimmering like a single jewel, seemingly expressionless and yet flickering with infinitely many colors and faces, a light by which we are quietly saved.

These aerialist eyes of mine, too, belong among those insignificant, and yet decisive, memories that life sometimes gives you.

—

*1) The eyes that connect the Shinigami Eyes of Death Note to first experiences in the real world, in the usual sense of the phrase, originally belonged not to me, but to my older sister. When I was a teenager, she often egged me on by telling me that if the feeling was mutual, I should just go ahead and have my first time already. I remember her saying that once you build that deep a relationship with someone, it is as though you are granted new eyes, like the Shinigami Eyes in Death Note, and become able to see things you could not see before. It was, now that I think about it, a strangely constructive and utterly unreserved piece of advice, very much like her.

*2) Though apart from aerialist’s eyes, I also have another set of eyes that sees ceilings as unreasonable lids maliciously closing off possibility..