Alien Eyes

My school tested me for autism when I was in third grade because I couldn't read. I was put in an all-girls classroom and we did nothing all day, because, according to them, we couldn't handle anything academic. The sixties had its merit, but absolute equality wasn't one of them.

This was one of the first things I told Bella. Not to ruin her entire perception of humanity, but to help her understand what America stands for—or what's its supposed to stand for: opportunity.

Because even though I was told that I was too stupid to amount to anything, I worked hard growing up and became a teacher of kids who are like me—dyslexic.

It took me years to finally memorize how to spell that word. And that was how I taught my students about irony: "You would think that a word about people who can't read would be easier to read."

So many of my students learned not only tricks for reading and writing, but also that they weren't too stupid to read or write, and that they are so strong for having come this far with their struggles.

America stands for opportunity, I told Bell. I quite literally came from the bottom. No one thought I would get to the top.

Bella understood, after a time.

It was neither her body or her mind that I fell in love with, but a mix of both: verbal language is communication, but the body expresses that communication in a language of its own; people will not believe you love them if you never look them in the eyes as you say it.

Bella has the eyes of an alien's. They are warm and soft, but they are not human.

She is what she is. I've grown to accept that her planet's core is much hotter than ours, and instead of an internal furnace, she's a refrigerator, and every time she brushes the hair from my eyes, I shiver.

She has not grown to accept this.

"Are you cold?" she asks, guiltily. Her warm eyes shine down at me and she takes her hand away.

"Yes, but it's because I'm old, my fairy." An inside joke: when Bella first told me of her kind, she related herself to a fairy, which is the closest human equivalent of her alien species. Wings and all, hidden of course.

I would begin to tell her that I'm also cold because I just got out of a really unpleasant shower, so my hair is wet and I am in nothing but a towel, but temperature is a very difficult thing for her to grasp and I would rather she try to understand human emotions than the cold.

She smiles at my joke, but it's gone too quickly. "Part of me wants to tell you, 'I told you so,' for picking this place out as a date," she says, "but I also know that's rude. Really I just want to warm you up somehow." Her hands brush over my arms, and my hairs unfold from my wrinkly skin. She frowns at my arms.

"My dear. That's what humans are like too." I ignore her coldness, and reach up to cup her perfect face—I remember when I was young and beautiful—and I tell her, "You're truly beginning to think like us now." I tapped her temple for good measure.

She batts my hand away, takes one of my wrists and kisses each pruny fingertip. "I don't know how humans have come so far with all these—these conflictions."

"Conflictions, that isn't a word," I hum.

"Oh," she says, and for a moment she reminds me of my students. Her eyes are alien, but her thinking face is very teenager.

"Try again, dear."

"Gosh, you said the woods was supposed to make people smarter. I feel like since I'm away from social media, I haven't read anything in ages. Uh, how about conflicting thoughts? Conflicting emotions?"