One Side Whispers.

Eye Contact

I stand in the driveway and watch your

ocean-water blue compact disappear behind the gravel

of the bend.

I watch your car,

and I listen to the tires crunching rocks

underneath them and I taste blood from beneath my teeth

and I remember.

I remember how your eyes looked the first

time I saw them, the swirling blue settling into

warmth, into fire, into everything I’ve always wanted

my eyes to look like, and I remember thinking that it

was probably kinda weird to be jealous of a guy’s eyes,

but damn, your eyes weren’t just regular eyes, they

were deeper and stronger and they weren’t guy’s eyes,

they were yours,

and that made all the difference, and I remember

you staring at your desk and ignoring me and the realization

that maybe three minutes was a little long to try to maintain

eye contact,

even though this wasn’t eye contact, this was like,

God, I don’t know, this was like our eyes bridging us together

in this alternative time warp where we don’t talk,

we don’t breathe, (nothing as tedious as air follows us in)

and wow,  four minutes was way too long, you were starting to blush

and it was suddenly extremely hard to break away, and I remember

hissing at myself, you need to stop, oh my God, what even are first

impressions, no, sorry, I’m done.

I remember how your hair kissed the warm breeze in a

particular way that poems can’t quite describe,

which should really say something, and the curves

of chestnut and mahogany and chocolate and oak were all

the same color, and I remember thinking that you must be used

to me staring at you, because you just kind of glanced over

and smiled with the corner of your lip. I remember the warm sand

flooding in over my toes as I stood next to the lake, and we watched

you, a few feet away, watched as you tried to kick water up at me,

watched your nose crinkle in a laugh at something someone else had

said, because I’ve never been a very funny person, although you

do sometimes laugh when I accidentally quote The Office.

I remember how the relief felt when I saw you step down the cafeteria

stairs at the first dance I went to in middle school

(coincidentally, it was also the last.), and how good it felt to laugh

- all my other

friends had found something else to do, and while yeah, standing

in the corner of the room in all black, watching people who didn’t

know my name prance up and down to some God-awful, bass-heavy

Top 40 track had been super fun, standing in said corner and watching

said idiots and laughing at everything with you

was a helluva lot better.

I remember your face when you tore off the green and red wrapping

paper, tossed the shoe box lid to the ground and dug out your presents.

I remember your eyes on mine, contact like a jumper cable, and I

remember your arms around me and I remember that you didn’t just

pull away the second you could, I remember that you stayed there.

I remember the edge of your voice, the sharpness of

words sticking  to my skin, popping and snarling and swirling and shoving

but the funny thing is you never said any of it, which is what I believe

they call paranoia. But it was more than that, it was desperation,

pleading in the back of my subconscious, if you don’t like me no one else

will and you know, I’m still sure that it’s true. I’m sure it’s all true.

I remember drowning

but let’s not talk about that.

I remember your laugh on a day with a strangling sky and even deadlier

air, and I remember waking up to your voice, opening my eyes and seeing

you and taking my first deep breath in a long time. I remember the not

knowing, the seclusion, the solidarity of my thoughts and my visions and

you,

and I remember that grasping, that struggling, that pulling up that I

couldn’t be happier about, the one that no one saw, the one that probably

won’t end up being all too real, but isn’t it nice to pretend?

Isn’t it nice to think that it all gets better?

That if I wait long enough, I can be okay?

I’m smiling just imagining. God, this is all so

I remember your voice, soft and sweet and shrouded in silence, off from

somewhere in the darkness next to me. The rain pouring against the window

behind us, the hissed whispers near the pale glow of the television.

Your headlights turn to the highway, reaching up to the gray and the mist

and pull themselves, slowly, reluctantly, away from the harlequin knot

of teeth and  hair and forgotten songs and would-be memories

and pencil shavings and choked air and movie-theatre popcorn and YOU-

and then you’re gone.

I miss your

eyes.