#and getting down to business
I look different, reflected in your eyes. My proportions shift, and I become a different man.
I’d say your eyes were like a funhouse mirror, but that’s making you the perpetrator of the reflection, and I have to admit it’s my own construction, a narrative I’ve slowly built around you. Tied you up with. Perception like a rope, making sure you look that way and not this.
It’s not that it’s so far from the truth, nor is it particularly deceptive, really. Just a pooling of thought down certain alleyways, past closed doors that were locked beforehand, until you’re in the right place in the right frame of mind. You see me, and I see how you see me, and it breaks my heart every time.
Because you’re seeing the best in me, each aspect amplified to a deafening roar, a crash against the rocks that suggests a force of nature, some all powerful Poseidon that is unflinching, stoic, ever-powerful. You’re seeing the waves, but I see what causes them, the ideas that compound on one another until they’re dense enough to swallow me whole, turn me inside out and leave nothing but a wet puddle on the floor. I see all the ways I could be the worst, abhorrent, repulsive. The suppressed urges that are buried so deep I wonder if they were anything but imagined, ever, if they’re just fears of fears, shadows in the periphery.
In your eyes I don’t see these things, and their absence makes them all the more noticeable. You ask what’s wrong, occasionally, when the mask slips, and that’s when I smile. A smile to match yours, one mouth mirroring the other, an invitation for them to meet. It’s a delaying tactic, no doubt, but it’s an effective one. Your hand might grace my cheek, mine might run down your side, and then chemistry and biology clash in a wonderful distraction. Fireworks behind a car crash, distracting the rubberneckers.
I wonder what you see. Whether my eyes are as reflective as yours. Do you see the gratitude, the appreciation, the love and the care, or are they as I fear, windows, each one a gaping cavern that suggests probable cause, unheeded intent.
But your smile never wavers, not because of me. I think I’m safe.
