byChrisWhite – 2014

It began with water. And not the kind that cleanses or baptizes, but the sea in its unrelenting indifference, glinting beneath a sun too ancient to care what it watched below. The vessel, small and charmed with privilege, cut its wake through the Aegean like a razored edge scalpel through silk. My wife, her infectious laughter made brittle by the salt air, stood near the rail with the wind threading her hair into strawberry golden cords. Friends and new acquaintances moved like ghosts in linen, glasses of wine winking in their hands, and the world, for a while, was without edge.

We stopped in ports where the earth cracked open into markets, and language spilled out in bursts of unfamiliar syntax. Turkey unfolded like a painted screen—ochre domes and steam-wrapped alleys, bazaars dense with scents of spice and incense and the rustle of haggling tongues. It was there, among pyramids of saffron and the call to prayer unraveling itself from minaret to minaret like a net flung across the sky, that I saw the eye.

No—many eyes. Beads of cobalt glass ringed with concentric black and white, strung from doorposts and fingers and the rearview mirrors of busses and taxis that swam through traffic like reef sharks. The thing stared without blinking. Hung there like a sentry, mute and eternal. On bracelets, in shopfronts, in the hands of children who giggled in languages I didn’t understand. A thousand replicas of a single unblinking iris.

I watched them accumulate.

The guide was a man of middle years with a beard like woven charcoal and a voice like gravel polished by water. I pointed to the charm. What’s the deal with the blue-and-black thing? I asked, the way tourists ask when they’ve noticed what the world already knows. I’d seen so many. I knew it must be ‘a thing.’

He said: “Evil eye.” He said it like the phrase was a stone he’d turned in his palm a thousand times. “Not religious,” he added quickly. “Not sacred. Just necessary.”

Necessary. That word hooked somewhere in the deep. “Necessary against what?”

He answered without flourish. “Against envy.” Not in these exact words, but in a litany of broken-English phrases that collectively added up to an answer close to the following: Against glances that carry too much weight. Against those who praise and covet in the same breath and never know the difference.

That night I lay awake with the eye watching from a bead above the bed. And I thought of home, of rabbit’s feet and four-leaf clovers, coins rubbed bald in pockets, the folk charms we carry not because we believe in magic but because life is so often a rigged game and we want, at the very least, to feel as though we’ve stacked the deck in some small way.

But the eye. The eye was not luck. It was defense. It did not hope. It warned.

And so I read. I traced its lineage through clay tablets and ancient texts, saw its iris reflected in Mesopotamian mosaics, Greek amphorae, Roman graffiti. Always watching. Always warding. Always anchoring the soul against that silent violence: envy.

Not hatred. Not malice. Envy. That quieter curse. The ache that hums beneath a compliment. The twitch at the corner of a smile. The way admiration can turn in the gut like spoiled wine. It does not scream. It does not strike. It leans in close and whispers I wish it were me.

And that whisper has weight.

They say it causes sickness, misfortune, the sudden crumbling of a man’s luck, a crack in the spine of his marriage, a car that doesn’t brake in time. Not because a god wills it. But because someone else—perhaps even a friend—looked upon his life with too much wanting. And the soul, being fragile, fractured under that invisible hand.

I understood that. Not intellectually. Viscerally.

I remembered standing once at a firing range, just a man among men, all of us playing war with civilian lives. I watched a stranger adjust the dial on an expensive Hensoldt scope. I watched the gleam of German glass, the click of precision. And I felt it—the twist in the belly. The muttered wish that his joy was mine. That his edge was dulled. Not much. Just enough.

And I knew I was not immune.

The teachings of my youth said envy was a sin. Deadly. The kind that didn’t scream for attention but hollowed you from the inside. The kind that made the devil grin. And later, when I wandered through the texts of the East, Buddhism whispered what the church never did: not to fear the feeling but to name it. To let it pass through like wind through grass. Do not fight the storm. Watch it. Let it go.

Easier said.

The hardest part was admitting I wanted what was not mine. That I could look upon another man’s marriage, job, child, rifle, and feel the teeth of it. Not because I hated him. But because I did not know how to hold myself gently.

That is the real cost of envy. Not what it does to others. What it does to you.

It does not ruin them. It ruins you.

It builds a mirror and etches their success across it so that all you see is your lack. It speaks in riddles: Why not me? Why him? What flaw did the heavens find in your soul that they spared him and passed over you? It fills your hands with air. It dims the light in your own life until all things become comparisons. Every meal, lesser. Every kiss, wanting. Every moment, an audit.

And still, we carry it.

Until one day you look at your wife—not with the eyes of the world but with your own—and you see that she has made a cheesecake. Not for a dinner party. Not for Instagram. But for you. Because she knows it steadies you. Because she knows it is your sacrament.

And that, too, is a talisman.

Not glass. Not blue. But sacred.

When I return to Turkey, I will buy one of those evil eyes. Not because I believe in curses. But because I understand now what they’re guarding against. The look that lingers too long. The smile that curdles. The longing that goes unsaid but not unfelt.

I will hang it where I can see it. Let it remind me that envy is not a weapon to fear from others but one we wield against ourselves.

And I will remember the truth buried in those ancient beads.

That the eye is not watching outward.

It is watching you.

Holding ourselves accountable.