Between armrest and atmosphere

I write this as I sit perched between armrests inside a giant tin can - a giant tin can with wings. A tin can that is supposed to carry me over the Philippine Sea from Sydney to Shanghai.

The clock on the rectangular screen in front of me reads five hours and eighteen minutes. Time moves thick and heavy in this floating-real-world time capsule. Like the Elmer's glue that I would sink my hands into in my childhood days. Enough minutes and seconds to think about quite literally every minute and second of the past six months.

As we drift apath to the Philippine archipelago Shanghai grows closer, steadily and excruciatingly slow. "Shanghai is not far from Korea" I think, as my gaze glides across the lit up screen.

South Korea, a place that has witnessed me transform into a version of myself which had long been buried underneath piles of rubble and ash, left behind by the cataclysms of my youth.

As I sit squished between two strangers, who, for some reason, are also embarking upon this gum-stretching journey to Shanghai from Oceania on a random Thursday at eleven in the morning, I find myself reminiscing moments which felt so vivid I wish I could download their atmosphere onto a hard drive in my brain to immortalize their still flickering bliss.

Many of these moments on my journey involved me looking up at the moon. Or the sun. Or a bug. And the other half involved people.

Sharing a boiling meal out of one bubbly pot with the family you made in a foreign country. A passerby offering you their umbrella in the rain. Giggling with the guy you met at an art gallery as you leap mid air during a silent disco. Being gifted free food to try as you eat alone in a basement restaurant. Spinning ten times before you throw off a frisbee to the strangers who just turned friends. Running up a mountain trek at 4am with someone you met a week ago. A dwarfish man helping you retrieve your bag charms from within a bench in front of a bookstore you just spent your entire afternoon reading in. Screaming along to "I Want to Know What Love Is" as you and your friends stick your fingers into the piercing airflow outside the Toyota Yaris you just rented for the day. Sharing hands with your newly acquired friend from Japan, your left arm squeamishly flopping behind your head, as you lunge into the paralyzing cold of an Australian waterfall in winter. Helping the friend whom you just made after swimming with whales pull off their wetsuit in the middle of a parking lot. Being pulled in for a saw-dusty group hug in between cracked and chopped trees as ants draw circles on your shoecaps. Laughing until you choke as your new hiking buddy mumbles out of sheer exhaustion. Staring at iridescent jellyfish dancing weightlessly while you hold hands with someone who makes you feel at home in a place that you are not.

I could probably fill ten more pages with moments like these. They collect in my chest like pressed flowers in a herbarium. It's the kind of moments that make you pause months later, overwhelmed with the amount of chest-hollowing beauty you were allowed to experience. How much connection you stumbled into.

Isn't it beautiful how our lives are essentially an endless stack of expansive memories like these? How throughout our - in context - pretty short visit on this blue bulbous sphere we call home, we all build a museum of intricate wonders uniquely our own? It could be the way light falls perfectly on a leaf in the dawn of day or the taste of thick humid evening air as you strut home after having said goodbye to someone who inspired you. Essence that can't be quite captured or shared. Something that thrives in the margins between memory and feeling.

I gently tap on the illuminated plastic in front of me. The time reads four hours and twenty-five minutes.

Vue - biological lense

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, but I think they're something even more extraordinary - they are each a unique camera that has never existed before and will never exist again. Every iris is a one-of-a-kind aperture, every pupil dilates to let in light that will be processed by a mind unlike any other in history.

When you photograph eyes in macro detail, you are not just capturing anatomy. You are documenting the very instruments through which entire universes of experiences are filtered. These are the lenses that have watched sunrises that moved someone to tears, that have seen loved ones pass away, that have witnessed moments of heartbreak no one else will ever know.

That brown eye flecked with gold? It belongs to someone who sees spring differently than you do. Those long lashes have blinked away tears of anguish and detriment you have no idea about. That particular shade of green in my mother’s eyes has reflected trees and skies from a childhood spent in places most could not imagine today.

Inherited Wonder

There's something about the way children encounter the world that adults spend decades trying to remember. They haven't yet learned to dismiss the ordinary as unworthy of attention. A puddle becomes an ocean, shadows on walls transform into dancing creatures and the sound of wind through leaves carries conversations from invisible friends.

My best friend’s chestnut tinted eyes reveal someone who collects moments most people discard - the precise way a pigeon lifts her foot as it struts along a paved road, or how the multicoloured bead-curtain on her neighbour’s window reminds her of pastel candy necklaces. Her irises hold copper threads that seem to catch light like coiled wire in mercury bulbs.

The blue eyes that carry a certain melancholy see beauty in places others find unsettling. They're drawn to the shadows between streetlights, the way faces distort in subway car windows, how music venues look empty after everyone has gone home. There's something about sadness that sharpens vision - these eyes catch the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s ‘The Scream’ and find kinship in the rawness of live concerts where strangers scream lyrics together in the dark.

My mother's eyes carry the strangest gift: they've accumulated decades of experience yet somehow gotten more curious, not less. The golden flecks in her hazel irises seem to multiply each year, as if wonder itself is sedimentary, building up in layers. She still giggles at sunsets, still finds non-animals in cloud formations with the dedication of a professional zoologist.

Each pair does the same impossible work: transforming light into stories - the same way children turn pieces of trashed cardboard into rocketships to embark on lunar expeditions atop blotchy and tattered living room carpets.

The Archaeology of Attention

Every macro shot reveals landscapes I never expected. Irises aren't just colored circles - they're topographical maps with valleys and ridges, patterns as unique as fingerprints. Some look like abstract paintings, others like aerial views of river deltas or dried earth.

But it's the stories I imagine that captivate me most. These eyes have been the first things lovers saw in the morning. They've watched children take first steps, witnessed final breaths, seen sunsets from hospital windows and city skylines from airplane seats. They've cried over books, sparkled with inside jokes, rolled with teenage vexations.

Each eye is an archive of moments - not just what was seen, but how it was seen. The same sunset looks different through eyes clouded in grief versus eyes bright with new love. Reality isn't just about what's out there, it's about the consciousness encountering it.

What moves me most is realizing that these eyes will never see themselves the way I see them through my lens. They can glimpse their reflection in mirrors, see themselves in photographs, but they'll never experience their own gaze from the outside. They'll never see how their pupils contract in bright light, how their expression shifts when they're lost in thought.

We spend our entire lives looking out through these windows, but we can never truly see the windows themselves. It's the ultimate blind spot - we use our eyes to see everything except our own seeing.

When I show people macro photographs of their own eyes, there's always a moment of startled recognition followed by something deeper - a kind of wonder at the strangeness of being housed inside a body, of experiencing the world through this peculiar biological camera they've never fully examined.

But here's where it gets wonderfully strange: show the same photograph to different people and watch their eyes while they look at eyes. Ginny sees storm clouds brewing in brown irises. San finds tiny galaxies spinning in green ones. Aura insists they can see unicorns galloping through the golden flecks. My friend Elo - the one enamoured by the way pigeons wobble their heads as they pace - she looks at hazel eyes and sees forests where each color change marks a different season, where deer made of light particles leap between shades of amber and green.

And children - children see everything we've forgotten how to notice. They find gentle monsters sleeping in the dark centers, compare the blotches of light brown in their mom’s eyes to the cookies from the night before and insist that heterochromia means someone had to borrow specks of color and gave some of theirs in return.

Seeing the Seers

Vue began as my attempt to document the instruments of perception themselves. But it's become something more - a reflection on the subjectivity of experience, a celebration of the fact that consciousness creates as much as it observes.

Every eye tells me that there are as many worlds as there are ways of seeing. That child seeing monsters in pupils and cookies in corneas, that friend discovering beauty in places others call ugly while insisting storm clouds live in stranger's eyes - they're all right. They're all seeing truly, just differently.

In our age of division and misunderstanding, maybe we need reminders that we're all just doing our best to make sense of reality through our own unique apertures. The same light hits all our retinas, but the stories we create from it - unicorns and storm clouds and sleeping monsters - those are entirely our own.

The next time someone sees the world differently than you do, remember: they're not wrong. They're just looking through a different camera, one shaped by experiences you'll never have, calibrated by a consciousness you'll never fully understand.

And that's not an error in the system of being human - it's the most beautiful feature of it all!