Book, cards, jewelry, those are the normal presents that you get when you turn 23. I got a pair of glasses. Which at first I was rather confused by, so much so that I didn’t even try them on. But when I got home from dinner that night I examined them.

Charlie said they were grandpa’s and that he had left them for me. Conversations between grandpa and myself streamed through my head like a river ripping towards the sea. But not one conversation about a pair of glasses plunged itself towards the surface of my memory bank.

They were a round pair with tinted blue lenses. The frame was a bronze and they were heavy. Who would wear these, I thought to myself. I took a long look at them, a deep breath, and then held them in between my thumbs and pointer fingers. I slid the bronze frame onto my nose and peered through the blue lenses. I looked around to see how the tint made different objects in my apartment appear.

That’s when I saw it. The woman on my 32 inch TV screen had what looked to be a tattoo on her right arm. Only the tattoo was on the outside of her long sleeve blouse. I slid the glasses down my nose to see what the tattoo read and looked like without the blue gaze. To my surprise only her burnt orange blouse remained. Where had the tattoo disappeared to? I peered through the screen, a moment later a man approach the woman. I looked from the screen to the object in my hand curiously. I lifted the glasses back towards my eyes and placed them carefully on my nose. Not only was the woman’s arm tattoo back, but the man in the frame now had one too.

Both actors had a curious rectangular shape around their bicep but each showed something different. The woman’s had a heart with a jagged cut down the center. His displayed a blaze of red, orange, and yellow. A broken heart and a ball of fire.

An abundance of questions flooded my mind. What did this mean? Why were they there? Why couldn’t I see them without the glasses?

It was well past 9 o’clock now, but I wanted to see if these glasses worked outside of my 800 sq. ft. apartment. So I put on my red zip up sweater, tucked my black leggings into a pair of brown ankle boot, grabbed the glasses and headed for the street.

As soon as I opened the door to the street I put the glasses on. I looked right and left and saw no one walking. I turned right and started walking down the sidewalk towards my favorite late night indulgence, ice cream.

On the corner of Arbuckle and Shine was the ice cream sign the size of a body pillow. It glowed of purple, pink, and white. While Jolly Cone wasn’t a chain ice cream shop and they didn’t have an array of toppings like other shops, they did have the best soft serve within a 100 miles.

The bell above the door chimed as I entered and approached the counter. The woman behind the countertop glanced up from her phone and then laid it next to the register. She then tried to take my order. I opened my mouth but no words came out. I was transfixed by the image of a teardrop on her right bicep, just where the others had been.

I looked from her bicep and then to her eyes. She was staring at me rather curiously.

She then asked with a raised eyebrow, “Are you okay miss?”

It took everything inside me to respond that’d I’d like a, “Half and half cone dipped in chocolate please.”

They say some people wear their emotions on their sleeves. But now I could literally see those emotions.

More questions streamed through my mind. Why had grandpa given me these? What was I supposed to do with them? How could I see random people’s emotions?

But above all else, I wondered what would be there, below my shoulder, wrapped around my right bicep, hanging on my sleeve.