Eye Deers

Eye Deers are shy, little fluffy things. They stare at you with large eyes, at least twice the size of their head, and whisper sweet nothings in your ear that you can’t forget until you’ve done something about them. They tempt you to make a song, draw a picture, write a poem. Sometimes they look like they have four legs, sometimes they look like they have sixteen. The only thing about Eye Deers is that they’ll get you to make something, get you to be creative.

As I said, Eye Deers are shy. Most people don’t believe in them. They’ve resigned themselves to their boring lives, convincing themselves that they’re not creative, that they can’t draw, that writing a novel or making a song is for those other people who have Eye Deers. This makes Eye Deers especially sad, because they hate to think that people don’t believe in them.

Eye Deers are mischievous too. They’ll pop in to visit you at the most inappropriate time. You’ll be in the middle of a nice shower, minding your own business, lathering up and singing _We Will Rock You_ but changing the lyrics to soap or shower based puns, and they’ll be stood there¹, staring. Those big cute eyes beckoning you towards it, the eye deer knocks on your shower and whispers something in your ear nobody else can hear. As soon as you hear it, your universe is expanded and a whole new plane of existence has appeared. You’d never thought of bread being toast and toast being bread. You’d never realised that in actual fact, all dough-based products have the potential to move between all states of being. Yorkshire Puddings are pancakes are bread are toast are panini. The eye deer beckons you out of the shower to go do something with this information.

My favourite eye deer regularly visits me on the roof of my house. I don’t stand on the roof of my house—that’d be ridiculous. I sit in the loft room of my house, in amongst the gigantic windows that cover most of the roof. I look out over the houses and the grass and the roads and think. One night, I’d got home late, but still fancied visiting my favourite spot in the house. I sat down and stared out into the inky night, and that’s when the Eye Deer stared back at me. There was the little blighter, its fluffy body billowing in the wind, just staring at me as it always does. It was telling me things without saying anything. I stayed awake most of that night working on something crazy because of that one.

The thing I find silly is how others think Eye Deers don’t really exist. I tell them, ‘go find your eye deer, it’s out there’, and they look at me like I’m telling them to stand on three hands and rub their belly with their fifth and sixth hands. One day, even the most cynical people get visited by an Eye Deer. The problem is most people just dismiss them.

Eye Deers should be grasped when you meet one. They should be stroked, loved, embraced, nurtured, believed. They should be played with, written down, drawn on, turned into songs, artworks, movies, animations. When asked questions, Eye Deers reveal answers. Cynicism makes them disappear, optimism makes them multiply.

Eye Deer are out there, inside you, inside others, on walls, on floors, up the stairs, down the stairs, in bungalows and even in bedsits.

They won’t appear until you look, though.

1. Or should that be ‘sud there’.

That’s a pun, yes.