"brown eyes"

Together; un-apart.

I was the left, you, the right. I read, you smoked. Then I smoked, and you pretended to read.

The amber glow. Lights turned out, the moon painted the walls with faint shadows.

The feel of you; the smell of me. No paint could ever capture that.  

You whispered. I shivered. Then I asked, and you answered. But the answers weren’t good enough.

The moon sets, the sun rises. Thus I feared the dawn. You slept. I loved. You left. I wait.

Or something like that.

Maybe I’ll just think of more questions, making up the answers as I go along, doing whatever it is I do to fill the days and survive the nights.

A CASE OF CONSCIENCE.

“You make me afraid,” she said, turning her large, troubled eyes on her companion, “you make me afraid, of myself chiefly, but a little of you. You suggest so much to me that is new, strange, terrible. When you speak, I am troubled; all my old landmarks appear to vanish; I even hardly know right from wrong. I love you, my God, how I love you! but I want to go away from you and pray in the little quiet church, where I made my first Communion. I will come to the world’s end with you; but oh, Sebastian, do not ask me, let me go. You will forget me, I am a little girl to you, Sebastian. You cannot care very much for me.”

  The man looked down at her, smiling masterfully, but very kindly. He took the mutinous hand, with its little sprig of heather, and held it between his own. He seemed to find her insistence adorable; mentally, he was contrasting her with all other women whom he had known, frowning at the memory of so many years in which she had no part. He was a man of more than forty, built large to an uniform English pattern; there was a touch of military erectness in his carriage which often deceived people as to his vocation. Actually, he had never been anything but artist, though he came of a family of soldiers, and had once been war correspondent of an illustrated paper. A certain distinction had always adhered to him, never more than now when he was no longer young, was growing bald, had streaks of gray in his moustache. His face, without being handsome, possessed a certain charm; it was worn and rather pale, the lines about the firm mouth were full of lassitude, the eyes rather tired. He had the air of having tasted widely, curiously, of life in his day, prosperous as he seemed now, that had left its mark upon him. His voice, which usually took an intonation that his friends found supercilious, grew very tender in addressing this little French girl, with her quaint air of childish dignity.

  ”Marie-Yvonne, foolish child, I will not hear one word more. You are a little heretic; and I am sorely tempted to seal your lips from uttering heresy. You tell me that you love me, and you ask me to let you go, in one breath. The impossible conjuncture! Marie-Yvonne,” he added, more seriously, “trust yourself to me, my child! You know, I will never give you up. You know that these months that I have been at Ploumariel, are worth all the rest of my life to me. It has been a difficult life, hitherto, little one: change it for me; make it worth while. You would let morbid fancies come between us. You have lived overmuch in that little church, with its worm-eaten benches, and its mildewed odour of dead people, and dead ideas. Take care, Marie-Yvonne: it has made you serious-eyed, before you have learnt to laugh; by and by, it will steal away your youth, before you have ever been young. I come to claim you, Marie-Yvonne, in the name of Life.” His words were half-jesting; his eyes were profoundly in earnest. He drew her to him gently; and when he bent down and kissed her forehead, and then her shy lips, she made no resistance: only, a little tremor ran through her.

Chapter 47:

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Vincent Van Gogh, September 7, 1881

Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one. “But you are faced with a ‘no, never never’” is your reply. My answer to that is, “Old boy, for the present I look upon that ‘no, never never’ as a block of ice which I press to my heart to thaw.” 

Still they lay beneath a blanket. Two restless souls swallowing words they shouldn’t say, they were finding comfort in each others’ whispers that sounded more like screams in the deathly silence of the night. They talked of Keats, and failed relationships, and unrequited love. The sea. Haircuts. The uncertainty of life. Beans on toast. The cardiac electrical system.

Sometimes it feels like the heart has a mind of its’ own. It beats of its own accord, and we cannot tell it who to love, who not to, to slow down or speed up. Consequently it was all she could do to concentrate on shapes and faces in the ceiling that weren’t really there in an attempt to slow her heartbeat that pounded against the inside of her chest. ‘“Oh, troubled heart, be still” - wasn’t that a poem?’ She couldn’t say. His husky whisper quivered through her ears, his beautiful words quenching her mind that was everywhere and nowhere. 

He hated seeing her with him. Every time they were together, he’d look on, powerless. He couldn’t understand it. But it wasn’t for him to ask why she chose to be with him - he was a good guy after all. Most of the time. But he’d hurt her, which made him angry. “I’d never hurt her,” he thought. 

“Goodnight,” she said a while later, turning her head as if to find his sorrowful blue eyes in the darkness. She could feel the force of his stare on her, pulling her in like the moon pulls the tides. It was then that she felt it; it was just a finger at first, playfully dancing around her thumb. But then she felt another, then a third, skimming over her palm as they trembled, searching for the gaps between her fingers. There they lingered for a moment, before he folded them over and clapsed her hand tighter - a moment later, tighter still. She could feel her ears burning as his pulse thumped against her hand. Her heart writhed in her chest, throbbing with every pulse, sending emotions to run riot in her veins. 

She knew she should’ve let go. But she couldn’t. 

Besides, they could go no further. In the light of day each others’ hands neither would hold. But that evening, hidden beneath a blanket, they could.