Light refracted in those clear blue eyes, seemingly to capture the exact hue of patchy cerulean sky above our heads. Those pair of lash-framed pools smiled, fleeting hints of secret knowledge danced in its depths. They seem to be focused on something in the distance and then back at my own deep brown irises, smiling right into the core of me. Transmuted into an old and familiar ache that begins to thump...thump...thump, somewhere much lower than where my heart should be, and simultaneously in my throat as well.
I held his gaze a moment more than I dared. Mentally chastising myself, I tear my sight away to find sudden interest in the floor. Side by side, two pairs of footsteps walking down a busy street, indistinguishable from the cadence of city-dwellers going about their lives, only separated by my own mental bubble of 'Us'.
A fleeting taste of disgust creeps inside my throat.
'Weak.'
The thought came unbidden. A statement. It just felt like I shouldn't be so weak from a simple look! Do I not have any sense left in my head? Has all my past experiences not thought me anything?
He stops by the cold grey marble tables at the cafe, just as the light of day faded. With a twinkle in his now darker blue eyes, he announced that he will get us both Chai Lattes. I smiled, nodded and I kept my shroud of mystery as tightly as I could, betraying nothing in my expression.
The quicksands of time had robbed us of 2 years and it was the last day that I could still see him face to face. I stared at his back, scanned his leather jacket, willing a hole to sear through it as he waited in line. Perhaps if my wishes began to come true, I could wish us together...
I held the brown corrugated cup in my hands; Steam wafted in the air; a busker sat across the street strumming his guitar and a breeze blew twirling leaves onto the ground.
We were talking and I wanted to hold him like that in my head forever. Spirited, smiling...warm...
"Hey?" he asked.
His voice broke through my reverie.
"Hmm? Oh sorry, you were saying?"
I smiled gently to reassure him. He probably knew what was going on in my head, but tried to cheer me up anyway.
He was always trying to get me to see the brighter side of things... and I even saw it sometimes... but only through his eyes.
I absentmindedly tugged on my left earlobe again. A tell-tale habit of mine when I felt insecure. I took a deep sip, felt my heart climb up my throat again and said :
"I'm going to miss you."
yet the unsaid words hung in my mind.
{[
We locked eyes for a moment, the briefest moment; but to my bared soul, it was a silent eternity, sinking into the depths of those eyes...
************
My lids swept open and my pupils dilated in shadow-streaked darkness. (Inhale.)
A dream of a memory, one year past.
It had seemed so real, but leaked away as soon as I tried desperately to grasp it. Like slipping quicksand through fingers, only the sensation is left when you close your palms.
364 days and a quarter make up one year, but a year means very little when you've left your heart to drown in someone else's eyes. I regain an empty calm, staring out the barred windows into the abandoned night.
Awaiting the dawn to paint the skies, the color of his eyes.
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