Three poems that (kind of) go together. The second one was inspired by the intro sequence of the game Disco Elysium.
I didn't know the meaning of the phrase swimming in someone’s eyes until I looked at his. wow. Big beautiful brown eyes I gawk at, just keep staring at. Every time I see him looking at me I want to freeze that moment and remember it forever. Right then I want to bottle his eyes up (weird thing to say?) and own them, have them be mine. I want to study them under a microscope and poke and prod them until I figure out their magic, because there has to be something magical about them – how I want to stare at them for hours. I open my eyes and I see him just a few feet across from me looking into my eyes. Does he see my eyes in the way I see his? Probably not. I wish. Does anybody see my eyes that way? Windows to the soul. His big beautiful windows with blinds that don’t fucking work. I can see everything he couldn’t hide it even if he wanted to. Not just the eyes. The way he lies down and his body folds in on itself, even the way he holds himself up when he stands. The way he laughs and the way he smiles and the way he leans against walls and the way he lets me lean against him and the way he kisses me on the head and I want to melt into him. The way I feel so safe when he’s holding me like nothing in the world could hurt me like everything is suddenly okay because he’s there. And fuck him for not knowing that I’m feeling all this are my eyes not enough? And double fuck him for letting me feel that way, for not pushing me away or punching me or calling me a faggot. I want him to be next to me right now so I can just stare at him and his eyes. I just want to look for a while. I want to lean against him. I want him to lean against me. I want to press up against his chest and hear his heartbeat. I want him to tell me that he loves me. I want to see him be happy. I want to see him get everything he fucking wants because he deserves it. Even though that’s going to mean leaving me behind because that’s what it always means. I dont give a fuck about that. I would do anything he asked if it would make him even just fucking smile. I would do anything to have his eyes to look at anytime I wanted. A virtual reality headset or something and I just put it on and all I can see are his eyes. I want to look at him and I want him to look at me. I don’t ever want him to be hurt by anyone. Fuck anyone who’s ever hurt this man. This fucking angel on earth. This guy who makes me smile by just being in the room. This guy who makes me happy by just existing. This is going to kill me. But I’ll take that chance if it means getting to see him and his eyes one more time. His eyes are this otherworldly substance and I’m a fucking addict. One more hit and I’ll quit, I swear to god I’ll quit for fucking good. Just let me see his eyes one more time. Let me wake up to him looking at me just one more time. Fuck. What am I going to do? Fuck.
No thank you. Please let me off here! I like pain and burning light and wanting things from people who do not want to give them to me. I like walking through beds of nails and rolling around in them until I can’t feel anything anymore. That’s the goal, really, to not feel anything anymore. Nothing is better than anything is better than nothing. Maybe the best thing would be to go back to living in ignorance. Maybe the best thing would be to learn how to move on. Maybe there is no best thing and my life is going to shit and there’s no winning here. I don’t have any dignity left to preserve.
Do you want to know the worst part about being in love with a man?
It kills you.
Yes, actually. There is no metaphor here – I am too tired for that. It ends your life on the spot.
Your head bursts like a balloon but there is no pop, there is no fighting or pressure. One moment you’re intact, a whole person with an inside and outside and a body as the interface, and the next those lines are gone. Your inside is on the outside – or maybe the outside is on your inside. And you don’t get peace after you die. You become a ghost. A phantom who has to watch as *his* life marches on as you stay frozen in time. You haven’t felt this powerless since you were little, when you made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t feel this way when you’re a grown-up. You would get a grown-up job like artist or astronaut and have lots of good friends and spend your free time playing video games and reading. You loved to read, but you don’t have time for it anymore – or that’s what you tell yourself. You owe an apology to your eight-year-old self. That poor lonely kid who always held out hope that the future would be better. The kid who ate lunch in the teacher's classrooms and went back home to get beaten black and blue. The kid who just wanted to be understood. He didn’t do anything to deserve all this. But you failed him. And you continue to fail him every single day. You’re pathetic.
Do you want to know the worst part about being in love with a man?
It’s not being able to be something he could ever love.
No matter what you change about yourself nothing will make you something he could want. Not in the way you want him to want you. You will never be the last thing he thinks about before he goes to bed, or the first person he wants to hug when he’s upset, or the person he wants to know everything about, in the way you want to know everything about him. He spends the same amount of time thinking of you as he does a stranger that passes him on the street. Momentary. Worthless. Easily replaceable. He looks at you the same way he’d look at an exotic animal in a zoo exhibit but without the wonder. You see whatever you want to in his eyes, but there is really nothing there. His eyes don’t romanticize or conceptualize. They are visual sensory organs that take input and convert into electrical signals. He sees lines more clearly than you. Men are born without color cones and they don’t even know. Or if they do, most don’t seem to care.
Do you want to know the worst part about being in love with a man?
It’s that he doesn’t know the pain he’s making you feel, and that maybe he never will.
Not unrequited love. That is part of it, yes, but it’s more. It is his indifference, the knowledge that you are not nearly as important to him as he has been to you. Maybe it's not you. Maybe men just do not feel, not in that way. But how? Can’t a man look into someone’s eyes and feel spurred to write poems about them, capture them in a photo, drive two hundred miles to the ocean to find all the rocks that are the same color and hoard them all so that they never forget that shade? No, men can feel just fine. So your rationalizations don’t work, dumbass! So maybe there is something fundamentally irredeemable and broken about you, because he certainly could feel that way. Just not about you. I want to wish on him the same pain he’s making me go through right now, the pain that he’s completely oblivious to, but I can’t. Through it all I still just want him to be happy. In the end I’m still just an observer, just watching. If we’re just a ghost, maybe we are meant to be happy through the happiness of others. But what a sad, empty life that would be?
Getting out of bed in the morning has become a struggle. The sheets are getting heavier and heavier. I wake up sometimes and all I want to do is cry, but the tears don’t come out. But then I think of eight-year-old me. I think of how disappointed in me he’d be and I have to get up. I force myself to get up for him. Not for myself, and not for anyone fucking else. I get up for him. I want to be someone he can be proud of someday. Someday. But how do we get there?
Astute reader, think back! Maybe the best thing would be to learn to move on. Maybe there is no best thing and my life is going to shit and there’s no winning here. Either way, I think the fact is that we win by continuing to play.