Seeing Someone

A post-divorce romance helps Amy Shearn view things in a different light.

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I wasn’t quite looking for love after my divorce, but I was definitely looking for something. Then I fell in love with someone whose eyesight was failing. 

The first time I ever met him, I was visiting my friend Amanda for the weekend. We’d gone out for drinks, laughing about the emotional Slip-n-Slide that was dating after divorce. “You don’t even get it,” Amanda said. “Dating in small-town Connecticut is so different than in Brooklyn. There’s not a lot of great options to choose from.” 

We started scanning the apps as proof of concept, rolling our eyes at all the blurry photos of nostrils – how, in the year of our lord 2022, did men still not know their angles? “Wait,” I said when I saw Jesse’s profile. “What, what about this guy?” His first picture revealed a mischievous grin and his profile text was spare but funny in a winking way. Amanda peered at my phone. “Wow, you found someone actually cute, how dare you,” she said. “This is my town, leave them to me!” 

But I didn’t, and we matched, and the next evening we met for a drink. It was, incredibly, April Fool’s Day. 

Jesse was even cuter in person. Uh oh, I thought, when I saw him in the shadows of the bar’s entryway, What have I done. 

For whatever reason, I wasn’t expecting to actually like him. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. 

There’s nothing sexier than being really seen by someone. Especially after feeling invisible in one’s own life, the way wives and mothers all too often feel, or anyway, the way I often did.

We had a drink in a dark bar where the bathrooms mysteriously smelled like popcorn. He made such intense eye contact with me the whole time that it was nearly overwhelming. Later I learned he largely lacks peripheral vision, but at the time I chose to believe he looked at me so intently because he saw something special in me, because I was so fascinating and beautiful to him that he just couldn’t keep his eyes off me. I still choose to believe this. Wouldn’t you? There’s nothing sexier than being really seen by someone. Especially after feeling invisible in one’s own life, the way wives and mothers all too often feel, or anyway, the way I often did. 

I went to his dramatic loft in a definitely-haunted former arms factory. We spent a lot of time in his bed, islanded in the spare bachelor’s apartment – not just because he didn’t own a couch but not not because of that – but we didn’t sleep together, not yet. Something crackled at a different frequency than simple attraction. 

He said, “I feel like I’m dreaming.” 

He said, “Are you real?” 

The next morning I told Amanda: “It’s fine, it’s just that we’re in love.” 

I had been feeling, in that moment, both erased and exposed. It was the spring of 2022 and my whole life happened online. I was often alone in my apartment for days on end. Sometimes I looked at a screen for so long my eyes ached, and when I looked away floaters swirled across my aging corneas. 

The way eyes work is, they don’t really. During the online school era, I wondered about the effect of all these screens on my children’s eyes. I looked it up one day, and was reminded of what I’m sure I’d learned in some long-ago biology class – that light travels through the retina, which turns it into electrical signals, which zoom through the optic nerve to the brain. Only the brain turns this into an image you can see. 

The National Eye Institute website adds, helpfully, or maybe ominously, “Your eyes also need tears to work correctly.” 

That April Fool’s weekend, the day after our first date, Jesse and I met again, at a cafe flooded with morning light. I felt insane. I was not at all used to texting someone the next morning after a date. “I like you, I want to see you again right now”? Barf emoji. 

 I’ve gone to a lot of museums, and I’ve gone on a lot of dates, but I was taken with this new thing: Going to look at art with Jesse, and talking about what we saw, holding hands as we did so. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held hands with someone who was not a child I had birthed. 

He put his hand on my back as we waited in line for coffee and my whole spine went hot. We sat at the counter near the plate-glass window. The intense eye contact was back. Mid-morning sun draped a veil over our faces. He told me about the long drives he loved taking all along the coast. He asked me questions about myself and seemed actually interested in the answers, and if you’ve ever dated you know this is something special. I was hypnotized by his dark curly eyelashes, his shy smile. 

After coffee, we hugged tightly in the street. Part of me figured I’d never see him again. I drove back to New York City, straight to my son’s baseball game, where I sat on the sidelines with all the other mothers. 

That night Jesse texted me a clip from Before Sunrise. I’d literally just mentioned the film in a text to Amanda. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about two people who meet on a train in Europe, and fall in love, and spend one day together before their lives take them in different directions. In the clip he sent, they are discussing the impossibility of ever seeing each other again, and Ethan Hawke’s character (named Jesse!) is telling Julie Delpy’s character, “I’m rapturous, and I’ll tell you why. I met somebody… and she was literally a Botticelli angel.” It’s like we both understood that something special had happened, some unusual connection forged. 

Another bit of dialogue from the movie: “It’s like our time together is just ours. It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream, and you in mine, or something.” 

On my next free weekend, a month after we’d first met, I drove back to Connecticut in my goldfish-cracker-filled car. We met at an art museum, to ease into whatever this weekend was going to be. 

This was the beginning of us going to see a lot of art together. I’ve gone to a lot of museums, and I’ve gone on a lot of dates, but I was taken with this new thing: Going to look at art with Jesse, and talking about what we saw, holding hands as we did so. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held hands with someone who was not a child I had birthed. 

At the college town art museum, we came across some giant Mark Rothko color field paintings, suffusing the small gallery space with their vibrance. We stood in front of the swaths of paint, shot through with orange and yellow. His paintings have always struck me as being something like distilled feeling. 

“What’s your favorite color?” Jesse asked me as we soaked in the Rothkos. 

I laughed. “Do you really want to know?” 

“Of course,” he said. “I want to know everything about you.” 

A couple days later Jesse said he had to confess something. Oh, my brain said, Okay, hm, he has a serious girlfriend? He’s in the witness protection program? What necessitates the verb “confess,” so dire and Catholic? 

What he wanted to tell me was that he has a rare degenerative retinal disease. This explained his bad peripheral vision and poor night vision. He’d been told as a kid that he’d be blind by his mid-thirties, the age he was now. 

A couple days later Jesse said he had to confess something…that he has a rare degenerative retinal disease. This explained his bad peripheral vision and poor night vision. He’d been told as a kid that he’d be blind by his mid-thirties, the age he was now. 

He seemed worried I’d be upset by this news, or not want to see him again. I understood his subtext. It was hard for me to imagine he might love me even though I was older than him, and a divorced mother of two. It’s always hard to imagine that someone might see us as worthy despite what we see as our biggest liabilities. 

Jesse came to visit me in New York and we went to the Whitney, and as we wandered around the Biennial exhibits we encountered a dark room. I had never before clocked how often art museums plunge you into low light without warning. He stopped, unsure. The first time this happened we paused for a moment. Then I grabbed his arm, and held it close to my body, brushing against my boob. “Here,” I said, “I will help you because I am so nice, not because I’m trying to get some action, I swear.” 

This was, I admit, the only time I ever lied to him. 

It became a kind of game. Soon he was steering us into the dark galleries presenting videos just so he could feel me up. Maybe museums are on to something with all those dark rooms. 

The shape of our relationship was so strange. Because we lived 120 miles away from each other, and because I was often parenting, we only saw each other every other week, if that – but when we did see each other, it was for an entire weekend, as if we suddenly lived together. We’d have sex for hours in his sunny loft, but we’d also go to quaint New England towns and beaches and diners and very often, art museums. He loved to drive me along country roads, through covered bridges and along the oceanside. It felt so luxurious to be in a passenger seat, taken to a place because someone wanted to show it to me. 

We were always looking at things together. 

One weekend we went to MASS MoCA and wandered into a James Turrell exhibit. It was one of Turrell’s dark spaces, described on his website as “an enclosed room with no seemingly perceivable light. The concept of a Dark Space is not about what one is supposed to see but the experience of what Turrell describes as ‘seeing yourself see.’” A plaque outside the entrance prescribed patience – it takes something like 10 minutes for a normal eye to adjust to the extremely low light. 

Jesse and I stepped carefully into the lightless gallery. We felt our way to a bench and sat. I leaned my head on his shoulder, smelled his neck, and waited to see something. He was nothing if not patient. Eventually, a dim orangey-red rectangle started to resolve itself, glowing brighter and brighter as my pupils cranked open. 

“Can you see it?” I asked him. 

“No,” he said. “Tell me about it, please.” 

I tried to describe it, and once I did, he said he thought maybe he could see it, a little. 

Jesse is a photographer, and often carried along a small film camera when we went on our weekend outings. Once he took a picture of me, lying in his bed, from the side. Later, when I was home, he texted me, “How are you so fucking beautiful,” and sent the picture. 

I was stunned by everything about this. I’m not comfortable having my photo taken, and I’ve never liked my profile. After examining the picture I texted back, “I don’t think I see what you see, but thank you.” 

I definitely didn’t see what he saw. But isn’t that one of the reasons we love to fall in love? Being seen by someone, truly seen? Having someone find beautiful everything about yourself that you find questionable? 

Once he took a picture of me, lying in his bed, from the side. Later he texted me, “How are you so fucking beautiful,” and sent the picture…I definitely didn’t see what he saw. But isn’t that one of the reasons we love to fall in love? Being seen by someone, truly seen? Having someone find beautiful everything about yourself that you find questionable? 

We were at a sprawling flea market on a scorching day. “Buy me a lemonade?” I said, batting my eyelashes, because although I am an independent woman I also never have cash. We walked over to the stand, arm in arm. I ordered and the man said, “Wait, I want you to ask me the way you asked him!” I laughed, surprised. He went on, to Jesse, “The way you look at each other! When I saw you two walking I thought, Oh no, they’re in love.” 

We both blushed so hard I’m sure we glowed. 

This kind of exchange happened a lot when we were out together. “I want whatever you two have,” someone at a coffee shop said. A woman at an art museum stopped us: “Oh let me take a picture of you together.” 

On one of our drives, a butterfly flew through the car’s open window and landed on my lap. Sometimes, it seemed like the whole world was on our side. 

Jesse had an opthamologist appointment and the news was pretty good. He told me that the doctor had said if he maintained his current level of sight until he turned 40, he probably wouldn’t ever go completely blind. It seemed to me like a weird way for the doctors to word it – as if he could help what happened, as if he could hold on to his eyesight if he tried hard enough, like a balloon bobbing in the wind – and a terrible suspense to live with. But he seemed pretty serene about it all. After all, he’d been living with the slow shifting of his eyesight for most of his life. 

His world struck me as being as simple and elegant as a Brancusi sculpture. Once in his spotless apartment I asked, in motherly disbelief, “Where do you keep your mail?” Where was the clutter, the things to be dealt with, the ugly mundane administrative mess? He laughed gently and said, “What mail, I don’t get mail.” 

I never quite figured out if it was all related to the slow dimming of his eyesight – his minimalist existence, his careful way of looking at things. When I asked if he thought it was connected, he said he wasn’t sure. Something we could both agree on, though, was that in contrast to his, my life seemed ridiculously complicated. 

Dating a divorced mom has got to be strange. I wanted to be seen, and appreciated, and then left alone. Once he said that he didn’t feel like he was part of my real life, and I thought, surprised, Of course not, aren’t you glad about that? My real life is when I’m parenting, and when I’m writing, or I’m working, or with my friends. My time with him was always a kind of exquisite interlude. To me, this was the best possible thing. But he had other needs, which of course makes sense. 

I didn’t cry when I realized it was over. I didn’t cry until I started writing this. High quality tears, plump with bittersweet lipids, so healthy, I guess, for my eyes. 

The last time I saw him we met in Beacon, in the mid-Hudson Valley. The Dia Beacon art museum was an ongoing joke for my friends and me, the place we always wanted dates to take us but that they never would. Jesse suggested it, and I was happy to see him there, but things were brittle. The simplest explanation is that we wanted different things, had space in our lives for different things. 

Dating a divorced mom has got to be strange. I wanted to be seen, and appreciated, and then left alone. Once he said that he didn’t feel like he was part of my real life, and I thought, surprised, Of course not, aren’t you glad about that?

In one of Dia’s vast chambers, we walked into the spiral of a giant steel Richard Serra sculpture, 2000. Serra’s works always strike me as both awe-inspiring and alarming – the enormous sheets of steel that look so delicate and yet so ponderous, that seem to keel slightly to the side, as if one wrong move could topple them and crush you flat. Both ponderous and precarious. Like love, I guess. 

We were trying to talk about how even if this wasn’t exactly working out, we cared about each other in a really special way. “Okay,” I said, “Listen. Let’s get married. But just inside this sculpture.” He smiled and agreed. We stayed and held each other; I enjoyed, maybe for the last time, how well we fit together. Then some children appeared, yelling – just like in a real marriage! – and I followed him out of the spiral, or maybe he followed me, or maybe we followed each other. 

As far as I know, according to the laws of inter-art-marriages, we’re still married inside of that Serra. 

In Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy says: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me, but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.” 

After Jesse and I break up, I watch Before Midnight, the 2013 movie that completes the “Before” trilogy. The Eurail-crossed lovers have found one another again, gotten married, had kids, and become boring and bickery. I think it’s meant to be sweet, but I find it depressing. I guess I’m still only ready for the first chapter.

If only we could see ourselves the way our lovers see us. I loved the way Jesse saw me, and I loved the way I saw him. I loved the way we saw things together: paintings and sculptures and light and dark and the road and the sea. I loved the little white space – the breath, the attempt, the ambiguity, the shared dream – between us. Maybe I loved that too much. Does love literally affect your eyeballs? The way your brain processes the light? Sometimes I wonder. 

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Previously Amy Shearn wrote “Writing Is About Making Choices” for Memoir Land’s The Lit Lab vertical.