##EYES
I watched your eyes tonight. Watched you watch me. I saw the space between our faces, the full sense of your face in my periphery, your round features, and especially that blue ring. I always focus on one eye when I stare at you. Usually the other eye is somewhat buried by the pillow. I don't move my sight from your pupil. I take you all in as one point of reference, and with it I get a full sense of you, your emotions, your silent presence. We watch each other for minutes at a time. Three minutes can be counted down relatively quickly in the real world, but in our bedroom it feels like I'm trapped in this position until the sun dies or until the encroaching blackness of my fading peripheral vision finally closes over you completely and I'm left looking at a black as total as your pupil. How is it that pupils can be so wide and take in such light, how can they fill the iris like an ink blot and show no sign of the veins within? What can a simple black object such as that express? I saw a vulnerable child in your soft roundness—the curve of your nose, the plumpness of your lips and philtrum. I saw an old woman, the matriarch to be in the sun-damaged freckled skin of your cheeks, mottled tan and rosy peach atop cream. I saw your concern, your serenity, your intensity in the light furrow of your brow. And I saw the quiet, nervous joy of love in the steady metronome of your furtive glances across my face: left, right, left, mouth, right…
Does every couple do this? We didn't used to. We fought. We had a hard time, we didn't understand each other. I guess really, we didn't see each other, and so we couldn't look at each other. We would lay in bed and you would turn away, and I would be on my phone and the night would pass us by. How many people have someone that they can just lay and stare at for as long as they want with no expectation, with no self-consciousness or awkwardness? Is this some magical "next step" in the road towards a more perfect intimacy? Maybe this is perfectly average and I'm just a broken individual that never knew intimacy before you. I know there's never been a point in my life that I felt like I could take someone's eyes without feeling like I either had to barter for it through conversation or steal it through unseen glances. To simply take and own this vision is a unique gift, and yet I don't even exactly know for what reason this experience enriches me. I think I feel as I do when I am in nature when I lay here. I feel my ego disappearing. My whole world is a soft pillow and the volume of your face overtaking my eyesight. This whole while I am looking nowhere other than that black pupil. Watching it dance all over my face.
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evan@thebogboys.space