Periphery

Do you ever see weird and unexplainable things out of the corners of your eyes? I always do. I blame it on my crappy eyesight, which ninety percent of the time, I'm sure it is. I'll catch the edge of the cat on the very edge of my vision, where it is not corrected and jump a few feet in the air. I'll see the air from the heat register fluff a blanket and my heart nearly stops. A car will come through the cul-de-sac and the way the light hits the remnants of snow in the circle will flash eerily in the house and I nearly give myself whiplash turning to check what I've thought I saw.

Those weird occurrences on the periphery of my vision tend to be explained by my oh-so-logical brain as spooky spectres, when in reality, it's something very ordinary. For some reason though, my brain can't wrap around ordinary when my eyes can't focus on the ordinary, and therefore will make up some fabulously creepy explanation for what I may have seen from the corner of my eye.

I think the weirdness in the periphery isn't always just in our vision. We catch snippets of conversation, secret meaningful glances and parts of a greater picture in our daily dealings and our brain struggles to contextualize what we've caught. And then it's off and running. Because of course, there couldn't be a logical interpretation of the events, no, it's got to be something fantastic and soap-opera worthy.

When my nose gets out of joint, I try, I try really hard, to contextualize things in as harmless a manner as I can figure out. I work to assume the best. If I can't, I go to the source of the periphery weirdness and try to get context there. It's a type of confrontation, I suppose, just not an ugly icky confrontation. It's a fact finding mission.

I hope that forcing myself to see flapping sheets and jumpy cats in the secret workings of others, rather than ghosts and goblins, means I am becoming a better person. It's certainly making me more direct.