Her head, like equal halves joined by mirrored opposites, told her manner. One of her eyes, the left one, scoped the room confidently while the socket holding the right one drooped every so slight. A keen observer, a counselor of all sorts of cognition, would recognize the skewed parallels in her features; each nuance, each shifting of expression; the imbalance.
With pupils clouded by years of blindness, Orlando could, by miracle, capture such modes – the sounds of her shifting steps, the cycles of her breathing; how certain vowels were slurred. Orlando knew that her outlet was the creative, a pianists, a writer of romantic poems, a dancer, and that her struggles were in her decisions. The same choices that drove her life of solitude up to that point.
(Orlando was, of course, aware that he, being of imperfect flesh, carried his own shades of betrayal.)
Foolish self-loathing never took root in his chest, it never had a chance to cast its shadow over the clarity of his world. In that period of his life, where the love of a woman was not yet felt, expressed or slaved over, his heart would cripple him like the disease that blinded his eyes.
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