BY ISCA IRANGWE / STAFF WRITER
The moment your eyes met mine, I knew. It was one of those moments in life where you find yourself knowing, innately, how something was going to unfold. How it was going to end. It brought forth the feeling you get when you watch a movie and know how it is going to end– spoilers and all– but still excited to watch it, to see how they get to the ending.
You looked at me and I found I could not look away. Your hazel eyes were unreadable but seemed to be stripping me of my skin and thoughts in an effort to see what laid beyond it. A smile stretched across your full lips, triumphant in its warmth as though you had found what you had been looking for; like coming home. And I, mesmerized as I was, smiled back in an effort to calm my beating heart, for I was excited and scared being as I knew this–you could and will break my heart, so I gave myself to you.
I was a peculiar child as you know, for I felt everything deeply. I was always looking for broken things so that I could fix them. Therefore, when your eyes met mine something in me stirred; you felt familiar. And when, in the darkest part of the night, you whispered “I love you” in my ear, I could see the doubt in your eyes and all I could do was respond in kind though I was confused. What did I know of love? Was I lying? Were you? Were we? If so to whom–ourselves or to each other or both?
My head laid on your lap and you were smoking. I admired the long stretch of your fingers, the way they held the joint, and I wanted them on me instead. We talked about the future; about the things we’d learned, our hopes for the future; you wanted to live by the sea, I did not care much for the sea and could not swim anyway, not that I cared much for it. You laughed and said you would love to teach me one day.
I could barely see your face, clouded as it was by the smoke you had just blew out of your nose. For a second I saw us in your clouded stare; holding hands and laughing, fighting and making up. Then I blinked and it was gone.
Blunt dangling from your lips, you inhaled. You had that look on your face that I hated. You sat as if nothing could touch you, without a care in the world and looked at me as though looking at a stranger. I knew that look, it was when you looked at me that way that I could feel you more acutely. Your thoughts were very loud and I could hear them as though they were mine, rampant as they were. You could not control them so you would shut down. Your emotions were too intense to face so you acted as though you felt nothing at all.
But I would. I would feel you so intensely that sometimes I got lost in trying to decipher where I began and where you ended. Trying to breathe but suffocating in the intensity of it all.
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