Sunday, August 12, 2012

La Mirada



I spend night after night wondering what it is that my love is looking for.

Has she been so broken by despair that the faintest glint of sunshine illuminates her whole being? A brighter future illuminated, a future free of the pains and disappointments of today? Is the breaking sunshine over the horizon igniting the hope of 100 Olympic torches in the whites of my beloved’s eyes? The whites of her eyes - the tiniest flecks are comical amidst the sea of pitch-black irises - just barely flicker, like the moonlight’s reflection off the oceans in the night’s sky when no one is watching.

Her eyes, as dark and mysterious to me as the untold stories of the millions before her, are an open sea. Serene and placid in calming waves of endless beauty on the surface, yet tumultuous, unrelenting, and unsettling as I reach depths never before explored by others. I think back to all the times that I have wanted to turn back – take to the safety and familiarity of the surface where I can again breathe – but deep within is where I am tempted to remain, and so I do.

Certainly my beloved knows by now that the pains and disappointments of today will never surrender, does she not? For her these pains have been as certain as the endless fields of corn that grow with every season, as certain as the pain of hunger in her abdomen as if her stomach has grown teeth and tried to eat itself, as certain as the emptiness left behind by a family that never existed.

Of course she knows this. She, more than anyone I have ever known, understands this. She, bored with the indifference and ignorance of the world, knows nothing more than hope; a hope I never want to understand. A hope I do not long to need so desperately.

To me, her gaze seems permanent and maybe it is. A gaze unfettered by neither anything on this Earth nor in its heavens. A gaze to forever remind me that things will never change.

I am not presumptuous nor am I disillusioned. I am simply a butterfly - changing once, but never again. 

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