My eyelids twitched for four days once in high school. I wondered if other people could see it, and tried to catch the twitch in the mirror, but it never happened when I was looking. That was the period when I went to the public library every lunch hour and strained my eyes over drawings by Durer and Kollwitz. I studied the heavy, dark eyelids in their sunken sockets. The thick greasy curve of the underlid, the weight of the eyeball in its sling of skin: I copied it into my notebooks with the blackest pencils I could get, pressing the soft lead voluptuously into the paper. A blind person could trace my drawings with her fingertips three pages down in my notebook. My own eyelids are embedded in flesh. I thought they were tediously modern. When I drew myself, I exaggerated the shadows, scoring harsh lines under my eyes. Time is making these lies truer every year.