Someone once told me that eyes were the windows to the soul, but I thought they had it all backwards. Eyes weren’t the windows, but rather, windows were the eyes, the peepholes to the rest of the world. A world that wasn’t mine, but all the same, I could look at, through the glass.

When I was little, my mom said I spent almost all my time at the windows. “My little window-watcher Katy,â€? she’d say, shaking her head slowly and smiling.

I’ve learned that faces, faces are a whole grammar of words we can’t say. Conversations held in blinks of the eye, tilts of the head; monologues in the raising and lowering of a single eyebrow. I like to think I can speak this language, but the truth is, I’m just learning. I used to speak other languages; when we’re younger, everyone can speak a whole language full of question marks. Why is the sky blue? Can you fall off the edge of the earth? What happens after you die? But slowly, as we grow older, the questions seem to fall away, shed like an unnecessary layer of skin.