When I Picture My Beloved

MONDAY

I've been meaning to ask you this, by the way. It might sound rather silly and I can easily imagine you laughing if I said this to your face, but I'm not kidding around. What is it about you that made you strong enough to not only look at me, but willingly spend time around me? What gave you the electric charge to stare right into my eyes without batting your own? Why were you able to stand being aware of my existence?

Eyes can be anything they want to be. Devastatingly beautiful or energetically powerful, they're the literal windows to our soul. They take up barely any space, but they can say every word in every language without speaking a single utterance. Sure, they're not emotion itself, but it's proper to say that they are the messenger of what we do feel and what contributes to us feeling alive. More noteworthy than anything too, they're what keeps us grounded. They tell us what we want in life, what our life is, what we need, what we want, and what we're supposed to be.

Isn't that so?

But for majority of my life, I hated mine. I think most people did. It's confusing how people are so against being different and being unique or standing out, but when it comes to the color of their eyes, the romanticized ones are always the rarer ones. Hazels, greens, and shades of blue -- rarely ever do you hear anything about brown. Blades of grass, sparkling seas, wide open meadows; it seems those things were more fun than the caramel coffees or the honey drizzles. That's the color of the pretty people's eyes, apparently.

For a while, I used that as an excuse for nearly everything I could. Why I couldn't find confidence in myself or why people didn't turn their heads when I walked by. Why I couldn't get the meet-cutes and the adorable love stories and all of that cringe-y stuff. I might've told myself that I didn't want it, but I did. I lied to myself regularly. It's what you do when you're hopeless.

Every once in a while, on a better day, I saw an unknown in them that made them captivating as if they weren't the same pair I was looking at in yesterday's reflection, but at the foundation of the theories and senselessness I decided it had to be because I was normal. I had to find myself through an alternate path instead of through my eyes.

Society said in this one way, I wasn't allowed to be normal and that it was dumb to think I ever would, so that was enough of a reason, yeah?

Wrong. I didn't think it at first, but everything changed when I met you. Your eyes are brown too, and they were the most hypnotizing things I've ever seen. People who said that nobody cares about the so-called ordinary eyes these days are idiots, and obviously weren't as lucky to come face to face with how yours shined with a million pieces of life and eagerness. In a world drained of those two things, you had them right there the entire time. Those eyes my love, they just as well be wrapped in a bow and presented to me as a gift.

I could get lost in them forever. Heck, I'd say I was found.

And that's when it hit me. People didn't look into my eyes, but it wasn't because of the brown, and it wasn't because they were sick of it. They didn't look into my eyes because it was terrifying to. They avoided me at all costs because I was reality. I was a mirror of what was really going on in the world that nobody wanted to accept. Every bit of disgust, of hate, of war, of pain, of hollowness, of darkness, of doom -- it was all in my eyes. I drove people away without knowing it.

I was too torn up to befriend. That got evident.

But you didn't run. You didn't hide. You didn't even share an accidental moment of shock. No, you looked right back at me and you smiled the dimple on your left cheek, prominent. If I'm being upfront, it was the top smile of yours I've ever seen.

I loved every single one of them, but that one struck harder. It couldn't be mixed in with the rest.

What was it about you that was able to go blind to what everyone else saw? Were you secretly just as messed up as I was? Did you make the badness hidden in my soul melt instantly so you couldn't even see it? Were you immune? Did you actually not notice it whatsoever?

I don't know. Maybe I'll never know, but what I did learn on that day and onward is that I didn't believe in love at one point. I thought I was as cornered as I was because it didn't exist, but the day came that I felt it myself. I believed in love simply and only because of the way I love.

And I found the only thing that mattered.

TUESDAY

Love changes a person, huh?

Before we feel it for ourselves it's easy to say it's a cheap placebo that makes us feel like we're contented and satisfied when we're actually not. We tell ourselves that that's how sad people fool themselves into rapture, and we force ourselves to pity them. The naive, innocent, young and untouched version of ourselves tends to avoid taking any risks. We don't want to lay ourselves down bare because that means falling into a bottomless pit that may very well choose not to cradle us the way we were cradled when we were young.

We're scared of not being caught. We're scared of being given up on. We're scared of being left behind, but feelings are embarrassing to a little kid, one new to the world and it's hardships. Extremely in fact, that when we tell ourselves we don't want it, we are very quickly convinced without any evidence to back it up. We run because it's the easiest thing to do.

We're all a sucker for simplicity. Complexity is too much on our itty-bitty minds.

And we grow up at different paces. Some of us might be breaking people's hearts left and right because we don't know what it feels like to love someone yet. We're waiting for it to click the way that people who passed us up in the race say it does because we stupidly care what they think and how they live, and it just doesn't work.

As much pressure we put on it to figure it out, it doesn't make sense. We don't know what we're doing, and we go with the flow for the heck of it. There's a lack of connection. Nothing is real. They can treat us like princesses, like princes, like knights in shining armor, and from the wrong person it feels too clingy and too intense. We start to hate that it's not laid out for us step by step, in the same mold as everyone else. We waste someone's time unknowingly, spending time with a person who could be treating the right girl in the right way in their own style -- a way that would work for them.

When we realize what we've done, maybe we feel guilty. Guilty because we barged into a story that wasn't ours and messed up the events that would've gone so swell without us.

But our time finally comes when we turn the corner. We eventually understand what people mean by the butterflies, the heart eyes and the rosy cheeks. We get what cloud nine is. What it feels like to be shot up into heaven.

It could start slow. At the beginning the love birds might not talk. They might not voice a single word. Shyness might've gotten the best of them, or it could be that the spark hasn't taken the wheel yet, but if it's fate, a Facebook discovery, a teacher's seating chart or an incredible coincidence, something does take control. Suddenly, there's that girl, smitten. That boy wrapped around the finger of a girl with wavy hair and a tiny freckle above her eyebrow.

There's no reason why. No huge romantic gestures, no flipping through an endless playbook of pick-up lines, no awkward giggles.

Maybe it's a joking conversation about picking up the cupcakes with the blue sprinkles at the supermarket that flares up for no reason at all, but a conversation that is stored in the storage of our heads as we take note of their likes and their dislikes, hiding plans about surprising them with it in the near future. Maybe it's the weird habit they have of getting in trouble or causing a ruckus that for some reason really amuses you. Maybe it's the clumsiness; slipping over the creeks and puddles from day old rain that is oddly adorable.

Before you know it, two strangers aren't so much strangers anymore. They're playfully hitting each other on the back of the head, flicking at the forehead and leaving a mark and the like, yes, but also using each other for balance during friendly hikes and becoming comfortable with physical touch.

They bug each other out of concealed love they're still calling the L-word. Sound familiar?

Then they admit it to themselves. They know they've gotten to the stage they've latched themselves onto someone else's heart and that it was too late to turn back. There's gossiping on the down low among the friends, seeking for their approval on the special name, or one last call to be stopped or be warned before they take the leap. Fifteen embarrassments, humiliations, "what if they don't like me" panic attacks, and a genuine, honest "you have to sit down for this talk" later, they come out of it as a couple.

A very happy one at that. So happy they're trading in their sleep for 4 and 5 hour phone calls that they don't think they can live without. It seeps in on them around there that they've become half of the corny couple that they didn't see themselves being apart of, but unlike before, they're proud of it. They're convinced they've found answers to all of their questions. They're convinced that the only thing they needed was to be able to call this person theirs, proudly, in front of the world.

That's exactly how it was for us too, wasn't it? We were lucky. Some people aren't as lucky as we are. For some people, that's not the end of it.

That initial period that puts us over the moon fades into something that not every bond is capable of handling. Friends throw in their own opinions enough that the lovers get used to the "why would you date him?" question with some answer along the lines of "because he's him". At first they mean it. They're devoted to that response, and the "I don't want better, I want him" kind of thing. The "I love him entirely, including his flaws", but soon she gets tired of it. It's more overwhelming than magical.

On both sides, actually. He's gotten used to the "but she's so annoying" complaints from his apparent squad, with the response that it's another reason to love her. In the beginning, this is simple. It's second nature to defend her, but then he starts to think about whether or not they can be right. If they have a better perspective than he himself. After all, don't they say love is blind?

Right when the base is already shaky, the mistakes and the imperfection come in. You learn the truth about your other half, the man or the woman that you called your entire world. You work at making yourself better as not to lose that someone, who has started to be seen in a new surprising dimming light and sometimes it seems stupid to. They let you down so many times, so why try? Why try to make it work?

But she does it anyway because on the good days he made her happier than any other person ever could, and she didn't want to have to figure out if letting go was a mistake or not. She knew that in such a short time, she fell in love, but what she didn't know is in such a short time there were more bad days than good. What she didn't count were the red flags.

She doesn't interpret the entire picture. She's conflicted. She's confused. She wants to avoid what makes her feel cruddy, and she wants to take in that dumb goofiness and hidden intelligence that made her fall in the first place. She wants only a partial piece of him and she doesn't know what to do about it.

Confrontations arise. Tears drop. Everything hurts. People give up. They break things off.

There go their hearts, just like that and they blame themselves for it. They blame themselves because they swear they should've seen it coming, and because they tell are hit with the realization that everything they were afraid of came true. They want to slam themselves behind their bedroom door and never come out, never try again. It's the first heartbreak, possibly the hardest one to come out of.

It's a new experience, having a stranger with memories and that's a package on the emotions, something that I don't think we were built to go through. It's too easy to check up on them through their online updates -- if they moved on, if they're hurting, if they brushed you off like a speck of dust, and it hurts. How could it not? This is the person who taught you what it felt like to love someone. The person that made love a scary bleeding nightmare. The person that will always be apart of you from here on out.

Because of them, you're driven mad. You're angry at a person for no personal reason besides the fact that it feels like they stole the one human being you let yourself care about. You're living with the urge to call them, text them and let them know that you miss them, that you want them back, possibly right back into the poison that they might've been. You're breaking down to random objects you find in your house like the Hershey's kisses you used to steal from him to pair with your bitter black morning coffee. You're trembling at the thought of tasting them again, because of how his face arises to your mind when it hits your tongue. Of the happiness inside a penny sized chocolate chip.

You hate how love is ruining you.

Why all these imaginary scenarios, you ask? Why am I going on and on about ideas they never happened and rambling about a pain to the heart I never experienced with you?

Well, if you think about it it's something to fear.

What if I'm the human representation of the sand at the bottom of an hourglass because someone messed with our story or because we accidentally messed with someone else's? What if we were once part of a story that we weren't supposed to be apart of?

What if this is the karma I never once believed in? Do I have to leave you because I made a mistake before? Because I was careless in my early teenage years? Did I climb a fence I wasn't supposed to climb? Did I befriend someone and cause a relationship to break when they were meant to be high school sweethearts? Would one tweak to my past change where I am today?

Is this the butterfly effect? Could I have done something to prevent this?

Could I have done something or held back on something to be granted forever with you, babe?

The most I can say is that the love I did get and did give changed me for the better.