"You know who’s endlessly fascinating? You. Really. You’re endlessly fascinating. I could study your eyes alone for hours. Ever look at eyes? No, really look at them. They’re not white with black pupils and hazel or green or brown or blue irises, they’ve got a complicated structure underneath. There’s a layer, a bubble of clear vitreous cornea and lens in front, a bulge that darts around wherever the person is focusing. And then they look at you. You are now staring into each others’ eyes. You are focusing your attention closely on her and she is focusing her attention closely on you. It’s reciprocal. That iris, with its nebulous filaments of muscle and pigmented epithelial cells, is facing you. It pulls open in the low light, the smooth muscle cells reacting unconsciously, exposing more of the black pupil within. Except that isn’t really a black pupil, it’s just approximating black like a cave. Really, on the back side of that little sphere is a retina covered in a lace of blood vessels and a grid of photoreceptor cells, each filled with stacks of photopsin-laced membranes, just like those thylakoids you learned about in biology, catching the light. But instead of turning that light into energy for ATP, those cells are sending signals to their nerves, and to her brain. And in that brain millions, nay, billions of neurons are taking all those little dots of light and assembling them into a face. Yours. A line. A line. A shadow. A nose. A mouth. Your own eyes, performing the same act. A head. A body. A person, a fascinating person."