so lost sometimes
Love,
I get so lost sometimes
Days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
When I want to run away, I drive off in my car
But whichever way I go, I come back to the place you are
Every day lately, I walk around with “In Your Eyes” reverberating inside me. A song about how important it is to see and be seen, how sometimes that’s the only thing that can rejuvenate us, the only thing that can reconnect us with ourselves and each other.
Almost every day I’m reminded that the world doesn’t really see me at all, or that it sees me as something to be reviled. At the post office the other day, a woman behind the counter was teasing the woman helping me about how long it was taking her. “Well, now you’re distracting me,” the woman helping me said, “so he…uhh…they have to wait even longer.” She wasn’t trying to be cruel. She just didn’t know how to refer to me. The woman teasing her, meanwhile, was completely oblivious. “And how would you rate our service today, sir?” she asked me. I said something polite in response and walked away.
Sometimes it’s more malicious than that, like the man who spit on me the other night as I stepped onto a mostly empty subway car, leaving me fuming with rage, torn between the intense desire to assert my humanity and the fear of violence if I did.
These reminders accrue and leave me feeling invisible, or at least unseen. They leave me guarded and vigilant against the hostility of the world. Days pass and this emptiness fills my heart. How I long for one person I could come home to, one person whose eyes I could look into and really see them, and know that they really see me, too. How rejuvenating that would be. How cold the world is without it.
In your eyes,
the light, the heat
(your eyes)
I am complete
(your eyes)
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
(your eyes)
The resolution of all our fruitless searches
The way a person can seem like a gateway to life, to the life you’ve been denied, the life you’ve missed out on. The way a person can replenish you when everyone else exhausts you. The way a person can make you feel seen and safe when the whole world makes you feel invisible and puts you on guard. The way a person’s presence can make you feel more like yourself than you even do alone. (The grand facade so soon will burn.)
I get extremely bitter sometimes, seeing the aspects of life that I’m completely missing out on all around me, all the time, and knowing that I don’t ever get any of the empty years that have slipped away from me back. But I also know that a person, the right person, can be a chance, an answer, a home, and make all the time you spent waiting and looking for them all right. Worth it. (The resolution of all our fruitless searches.)
What a difference it would make to have a home in your eyes.
Notes
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