(no subject)

[proximoception]

I turned to find she was looking up at me. It was a look of strikingly unspecific expectation. Her eyes shone as much as eyes can, short of crying, I think because her pupils were so large. They were open almost as wide as her eyes, these fathomless eyes within her eyes. Her mouth was open so slightly anyone looking from farther away or from a different angle would perceive it as closed. She was completely still and straight. I knew from such a standstill her first movements would have to come slow, slower than any movement I could ever make. It was terrifying how slow she was about to be.

And what the fuck did she want from me? We'd only been talking about this or that. She'd come to laugh at me less nervously, more frequently and loudly - that I'd noticed, but who cared? People go from that to this, there's no keeping track of all of it. But here suddenly she was submitting to me. Permitting me to do some thing or range of things left shapeless in those dark eyes. Asking me to ask for what neither of us could name. Who asked her to? Why would anyone do such a thing? It was an absurd mistake. She'd been someone like me just before, and now those eyes were out, now this.

And what should I do about it? I was prepared for nothing. I offered to get her a drink and hurried off, turning my head to avoid her slow smile. Walking back toward her with the drinks was when I disappointed her. She read the words or silence on my face. Hers flashed through several recognizable emotions before settling on an annoyed, defensive look she shortly wandered off with. A few days later I saw her with someone else outside an art gallery, giggling and touching his arm, not noticing me at all. Her beauty turned my blood to pain.

When I saw that look on another face I knew what to do, and did it. And all of that was in order; there was a series of shocks, but each, to my relief, soon proved a new, unforeseeable order of its own, an order some part of me loitering in the back room had already always belonged to. None were like that first, that falling in all directions at once, that sudden, crucial failure at a task I hadn't known I could even be set.

It was nice to have satisfied that second look (or thought I did). To have taken it down from its impossible setting and led it gently into the streets of reality (though I subsequently lost it in the crowd). To never see that seal of sudden disappointment (just the incremental clouding of the gradual).

I, even now, even I, still get the look from time to time - yes, less often than when younger, I suspect - but never make the mistake of looking straight back at it. You either walk away from the look or you lead its bearer after you into the dark. You don't want to see what becomes of it.

But that first look expected more of me than I've ever given, more than love, sex, talk, yardwork, loyalty, whatever the hell I'm good for. More than I'm able to give, you might surmise, and you'd have all the facts on your side; but something about that look she gave me, right to me, so long ago, permits me, asks me, asks me to think otherwise.