His Eyes Are Lost
I tried to describe you to someone today. “Well, what’s he like?” is how it started and everyone knows its all downhill from there. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, brown. He’s brown with a dash of red and a sprinkle of white. He’s nice, funny, sweet, smart. He went to college. He works at this place doing this thing that isn’t that interesting to anyone but him. He kisses me goodnight and texts me all day.
But that didn’t sound like you. That sounded like every other boy that has ever put his arm around a girl or called her beautiful. That sounded like every other boy with brown hair, eyes and skin. I tried to describe you to someone today and I described every other male human sitting in the room. I described every single boy I’ve dated. So I thought long and hard and I’d like a redo. So here it goes.
TO ANYONE WHO HAS EVER ASKED:
His eyes are brown.
His eyes are lost. They are looking at his grandfather’s house in England once and staring out over his apartment balcony to the Hong Kong street below the next. The gold flecks in his eyes match the yellow leaves we crunch into the ground, autumn leaves he hasn’t seen since Paris. That’s my simple answer.
His eyes remind me of that time my sister got lost at Disney World. We searched and searched and looked under tables and screamed at strangers to tell us where the four year old with the monkey backpack was and when we found her she was sitting on a bench staring at a bird that was munching on a bread crumb at her feet. My mother cried into her hair and all the time my sister looked around at us as if to say “haven’t you been here the whole time?”
His eyes look like the first time I shocked myself and felt a jolt of static spread through my finger like a zap of lightning lighting up each vein in a bright yellow road map under my skin.
His eyes are the movie I saw where the guy doesn’t get the girl at the end but we flash forward a couple years to see him happy and content with the life the screenwriter gave him and even though the audience is screaming at the movie screen for this horrible bout of misery this poor man has been forced to fictionally live with he just stands there with his arm around some girl who is probably a huge bitch and is definitely not worthy of him because she’s NOT Amy or Jill or whatever boring name the girl he was supposed to end up with had.
His eyes are yes, brown. But they are more than that. They are chocolate. A chocolate that you find in the back corner of the pantry when you are hungry in the middle of the night. They are a full Snickers bar on Halloween from that one house that you always hit last because you know that even if the whole night was a drag, you can always rely on them to finish the night off strong with a FULL SNICKERS BAR, PEOPLE. They are Valentine’s day chocolates that everyone knows are so cheesy that you can’t help but love getting them. They are the Hershey’s kiss that somehow ended up under the bed while also being the fudge brownies that soak up all the tears you inexplicably shed for no reason though lets be honest, you’re a girl, everyone knows what the spontaneous tearage means.
His eyelashes are long and his eyes crinkle around the edges and if you look close enough you can see your whole life story hidden in there because he’s listened to every story and remembered every detail whether he’ll admit it or not because he’s a writer and you are interesting to him in a way that no one else is.
His eyes are brown. But his eyes are beautiful and they are the stuffed Dalmatian I slept with when I was little and the railing that caught me before I fell down the chapel stairs and the ocean I drowned in and the hands that pulled me out and the air I breathed in.