Someday

by Rhysenn
 
 
 

I sometimes wonder why I even bother.

I watch you from across the room, where a few steps away seems too far to reach, as if we
were on a different dimension, another wavelength altogether. Your eyes are lowered, framing
you with an expression of serenity and innocence and oblivion, and I keep watching you,
gazing unabashedly across the distance between us that is both seen and felt.

You don't see me. You never have.

I bite my lip ponderingly, lost in thought and feelings and you, looking at your slightly bowed
head and imagining the colour of your eyes, pure and vivid in my mind like the whisper of your
smile, transient and unforgettable and never directed at me.

Sometimes I despair that we're too different.

Other times I try to believe there's a chance.

And in between I don't know what to think at all.

I spend an inordinate amount of time like this, watching you as you look elsewhere, watching
you not notice me. I find it strangely comforting, though, because I can look at you without you
looking back, without having to see the composed nothingness reflected in your eyes, shadows
of an intangible emotion obscured by a calm, detached expression.

If it was defiance or rejection or insolence, it'd at least be easier to take, a swift knife through
a tentative hope. But it isn't, and an empty blankness pushes me away, though leaving gaps of
ambiguity that I'm all too eager to give the benefit of the doubt.

You suddenly look up, your clear eyes flickering sharply in my direction before I can flinch
away, and I don't. You look straight at me, a mixed expression of knowing and understanding
darting in your eyes, pale vestiges of what I feel all too achingly.

I hold my breath, waiting...

The fleeting emotion dissolves as quickly as it flared, shuttering up within the depths of your
eyes, unreadable, lost. The cold aloofness returns, plainly familiar yet somehow incongruous.

And I ask myself why I even bother, when you're there and I'm here and between us lies a
chasm of uncertain chances bridged by nothing except the thought of you and my fear to let go.

Deep inside I know no answer.

Maybe someday we'll meet each other's gaze and not look away. If you take a step forward
I won't move back.

But now all I feel is a shiver of empty fire running down my spine as your eyes cross mine,
piercing and intense and coloured with my dreams, before the space of a heartbeat rushes by
like a thundering breath, and you turn away, everything else fluttering back into place in the
wake of your lingering gaze.
 

Someday.