My eyes burn
My eyes burn wide open. I drag them closed bound with my dark vision and the traces of her profile begin to alight in negative on my mind. Her eyes are closed. I looked at her on the street and saw just a person. She and I are barely people. We are a series of moments when we come into each others view, and then there are moments of absence. It is debilitating to sustain the constancy of the relationship, or at least the coexistence, of both she and I together in time. When I see her from my window, one of us is not there. She slides right through the moment, eyes on the sidewalk, weeks or days before my gaze existed. I cant describe my appearance in bits of her life. I wasnt there. I think that was my reluctance, although it was no more of a choice than anything else to have us fall together into this night or into this apartment. My reluctance to begin this plat that would house us both was a product of the conditions which made us apart. If the intervening space was filled with walls, then time moved forward through my digestion of them. I thought perhaps she was forgetting me. I dont know that she was aware of me at all. If time was meted out by increments of envelopes and letters and circulars then I sorted them until they were gone. I didnt lose time. It fell away, but it first became familiar, then was easily forgotten. But there kept being other things, and the reflection of a woman that traced desperate tension around these increments remained mediated in the cold things that reflect light, so distant as to become unnoticeable. The reluctance, the reluctance of chance, to put her here, became familiar. Every night in the apartment I knew that I would be alone. I had surroundings. Why did I need vision. Why did I need to see behind what I see. Why would anything beyond the surface that I am and that I plod across have anything for me. It isnt a puzzle. The pieces go where they are and they dont need to come together into anything other than a length. Why should I see other than what I see. I see her in my closed eyes, unmoving, but real. She is not a sign, but I know things are hidden in her. I can only see her in the dark by closing my eyes. She is not a harbinger because things have already begun to end. She has been imminent for so long that I know the remaining bits will be filled with her, and her she is, and she is asleep, so I know that they must be few, and although she is here and she will fill the frame, these last bits are only my own. There are too many people. Too many names that must be people. Am I one. A pasty, pale lump, fragile. I wont last. But I am not alone.
