Why I Wrote The Eye Collector

Every writer begins a story for a reason, even when they are not fully aware of it. Sometimes the reason hides behind a memory, or an unanswered question, or something that broke inside you long ago but never stopped breathing. The Eye Collector came from that place in me.

I wanted to understand why people fear what they see in others, and even more, what they see in themselves. I wanted to explore the quiet violence of observation, the way we look at each other, how we define one another through fragments, how we collect pieces of truth and lie to ourselves that it is the whole picture.

When I began writing, I realized that eyes are not just organs of sight. They are emotional mirrors. They hold our memories, our guilt, our hunger to be understood. They betray what the mouth refuses to confess. And that is where the story took shape, in the space between what is seen and what is hidden.

The Eye Collector is about perception, but also about survival. It is about how trauma reshapes the mind, how guilt becomes a language, how loneliness grows roots in silence. Every character in the book carries a reflection of something I have felt or witnessed in others. X is the embodiment of suppressed pain. Ivy carries the light that refuses to die, even when it flickers. Halden is reason trying to make sense of chaos, and Mira is the haunting echo of everything we lose when we choose to look away.

Writing this book forced me to confront the idea that we are all, in some way, collectors. We gather experiences, people, emotions, and then arrange them in patterns that make sense only to us. Some collect beauty, others collect wounds. X collects eyes because he wants to understand truth. I wrote him because I wanted to understand myself.

The process was not comfortable. It demanded that I enter the darker corners of my own psychology, the parts that analyze, isolate, and question. It made me realize how fragile the line is between empathy and obsession, and how easily love can transform into something unrecognizable when it grows inside fear.

For me, this book is not only fiction. It is therapy disguised as a story. It is a psychological autopsy of perception and desire. It is about the loneliness of being awake in a world that prefers to dream.

If The Eye Collector reaches anyone who has ever felt unseen or misunderstood, I hope it reminds them that even in darkness, awareness is a form of light. Seeing yourself, even in pain, is an act of survival.

Maybe we all become collectors in the end. Not of eyes, but of understanding.