Brown Eyes

Tonight, for the first time, I saw bright brown eyes fade to a dull lifeless sheen.
It's not the first time I've seen death, I have personally witnessed many blue eyed boys expire, and even some hazel and green.  Never brown though, with their little specks of green and gold near the center.  Never, until now. 
It's harder then with the others, because before all I felt was anger and bitterness. Now I have not only lost my pride and a piece of my heart, but I have lost my future and most of my past.  Who am I now, to go out into the world alone and unchaperoned?  Who am I to believe that I am worthy of searching for such a love again?  I gave everything of myself away, and when it was cast back to me I have found it impossible to gather all the pieces of me back in any logical sense of order. 
It is not my first heartbreak, but it is my first check on reality.  I thought, for some naive reason, that when there came the time that I truly gave everything of myself away, that I let myself go and just fall into happiness, that somehow there would be no way I could fail.  I thought when that day came my future would be carved deep into everlasting stone.  There is no contingency plan.  There is no escape route. 
I will love you until the day I die, this I know.  I will never fall out of love, that is as impossible as it is for me to curb my emotions at two in the morning.  I will love you forever, but will you ever love me?
This is why I saw those lifeless eyes tonight.  It is what I do, what I did, when I felt myself getting too deep into hysteria. 
Fictional murder is infinitely better then the reality of loneliness.
With you though, it is different.  I can't kill without a conscious, without remorse. 
You are my life.  You are my love.  You are a part of myself, and if I murder you I simultaneously commit suicide. 
So, with a flick of an eyelid, I watch those beautiful brown eyes find their life again.  I won't close them forever, not yet.
But please, a concession from you as well.
Promise me, please.  Don't break my heart. 

Someone.

I want to be your someone.  I want to see you grin.
Cheesy, I know, but real nonetheless.
I know you don't need to hear it, but I do love you.

I used to dream of the New York City Ballet.  Not the corps, but the principal, the prima ballerina.  Visions of the grand entrance with my picture plastered outside, me as clara, the swan princess, Juliet.  At the ripe old age of 30 perhaps I would retire, living in a high rise in the Village and teaching an exclusive class for other young dancers.  This dream died when I turned 12.

Next I saw myself on a stage just off Times Square.  Center stage with a spotlight, looking searchingly into the darkened balcony.  The audience would weep as I did, and at the end of every show my bow would come last to a standing crowd who would proclaim "Brava, brava!"  For years I held this, examining it each night before I slipped into sleep, embellishing and fast forwarding through the bitter details.  One year, I got to die onstage.  The house of 300 almost sold out one night; my greatest hour.

Now I have a different dream.  I am standing alone, looking at myself in a glass.  My reflection is wearing white, and I am carrying lilies.  I linger on this thought, because I don't want to wear out what comes next.  You, at the end of a grassy lawn, looking back at me.  You are smiling and somehow things are just right.  I don't know how but I am with you and you are looking into my eyes and I know. Later I will drink and dance and my father will tell me he is happy and proud of me- of us.  The night will spin on and on until we are alone again, and you are telling me that this is forever.

This is my dream now.  This is what keeps me living with passion.  You don't want to hear this, I know, but the idea of living a simple life with you makes me breath a little easier.  I love you, and I won't stop saying it.  I love you, and I want to be your someone.

life.love.regret.

Something from a fellow old soul tonight-and my first guest post.  He captures poignant love and the hurt of losing it with a simple elegance, and without killing any marines.  Thank you James, for sharing this with me and for let me in turn share it with others. 


Before I get started, that's a particularly concise and evocative phrase. Good job, Unbroken.

Three words that have turned out to be a fairly popular t-shirt, if you think of the hardcore punk community as a runway. But those three words have quite a bit attached to them. life.love.regret, perhaps foremost, is a mid-90's genre defining record by San Diego straight edge band Unbroken. Suffice to say they were loud, heavy and wrote songs that turned mosh pits turn into hospital visits. Much more would bore you with description. Tellingly, Unbroken did a cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Now you know what the t-shirt stands for, but I think that phrase is wrong and myopic at best and straight up lying at worst.  The kids who wear the Unbroken t-shirts, are not, at the time of wearing the t-shirt, historically known for being happily married.  In other words, life.love.regret skews young and I'm writing it with us in mind.

Here's the thing. life.love.regret. as a sentence clearly articulates a mindset, that you will live, you will love someone and what comes after that love are regrets, piling all the things you should have done in hindsight on top of you, like a blanket.

That feeling of loss is what life.love.regret speaks so vividly and absolutely about. Maybe loss isn't the right word. The more I think about it, what's more precise or less wrong than loss is the word unpublished. The knowledge that there are feelings and expressions and emotions that can't or shouldn't be accessed anymore. There was something there, but now it's not and instead there is only a conspicuous absence, or a blank spot in the shape of where he/she/they/whomever curled up next to you or said something that triggered your dopamine receptors or however it is that science works and that swelling, headswimming feeling inside you happens and you realize you love them, that's











gone.


life.love.regret is about that. It's memorializing that feeling. Perhaps even worse, enshrining it. Sure, there is haunting and passionate art that comes from that pain, it's powerful, after all. It's also universal. In the previous paragraph, I'm not talking about anything you as a human being haven't already experienced. If you live long enough, this will happen to you. There will be almost primeval volumes of it. It will intoxicate you.

If it hasn't happened already, I can only promise you that it will. And I'm sorry.  But more than that?  You will lie in places where you wouldn't stand, to quote Planes Mistaken For Stars, a band that covered Unbroken.  You might even do worse things afterwards. You'll make mistakes and those will be tragic, stupid or any combination between the two. That loss is rough and in trying to fill that explicitly, you'll fail.

And the loss will not fade, not if you're thinking about it that way, which makes it a dramatic thing to put on a t-shirt.

But if you don't think about it like that? More things happen to you. And as the more things that happen transpire and more yarn is added to the sweater of your life, the less central the loss gets. In 2008, I had my head fucked with, brutally, by people that were trying to protect themselves. That sounds big but it just means the relationships got bad, it got too heavy and they bowed out in ways that were not graceful. Unsurprisingly, alcohol was a lubricant.

I spent a couple months of spring 2009 dealing with the psychic fallout. It was the first time something of that magnitude happened to me. It devastated me at the time, but since then, I've been talking easily about it like ancient history, war stories from a magical time before Twilight, when the conclusion of Harry Potter was the widest collective supernatural event in our recent memory.

That's what life.love.regret. misses. Your life continues, if you let it. Yeah, being discarded with the rapidity and purpose of a filled condom suuuuuucked and was one of those "defining" moments, but you know what else was a defining moment? Getting drunk in November 2010 with the guy who writes Uncanny X-Men. That pain and turbulence from 2008 and 2009 are hilarious stories at this moment. It's not like those stories are any less important or that pain was any less real, but that distance heals quite a bit because I chose not to make those things or those people central in my life.nny

Put simply, life.love.regret. by virtue of its period, dramatically ends the thought. Put even simpler: life.love.regret. means regret is the last thing. Regret is what you're left with. That's not really the end, is it? You must go on. You must keep living. After all, there are classes or you are scheduled for work in the morning. All things pass in the microscopic skirmishes of our daily lives.

And that's good! As amazing as being in love, wrapped up in lust and losing consciousness exhausted in their arms is, the feeling will happen again with a different person. This love is not the final love. True, tomorrow isn't promised and one ought to live accordingly, but live is the important verb there.

Sharks must move forward to keep feeding and the truism's apt. To keep living, and truly, sincerely, living, the forward momentum that life.love.regret. inhibits is crucial.



Thanks, Emily for the space and the platform. I've wanted to write this for years and only knew it a couple weeks ago.

Christmas in the District

She is young, and he is too.  They're sitting on a park bench along side the river, and they're holding hands.  A bird hops close enough to eye her shoelace suspiciously, and she stares back with equal curiosity.  He turns away from her and spits words into the wind.  They snap across the thick autumn wind.
"You're not as young as you used to be, anyway." 
His eyes are roving a group of coeds, squealing on a blanket nearby, fingers frantically texting on sleek bejeweled phones. 
She does not reply, but looks down at her bare knees.  Blue veins pop out and up, distorting the milky skin.  Her hands fold themselves quickly on top of her legs, and she leans out to look at the rippling water.
"I'm not old yet;" it slips out of her mouth as a whisper but he is too intent on a bronze haired lass to notice her slight decent.

The next week it starts snowing.  Just little flurries of flakes drifting from the sky; enough to excite children who are playing with their nannies on the browning lawn.  They're back on their bench, his hands stuck into his jeans and her nose reddening in the frosty air. 
"I don't know why the hell you dragged me out here today.  It's god damned near freezing."
"We used to come to the river all the time in winter, you remember watching the ice break the spring before last."
"Yeah well, maybe one of us has lost a little of their extra blubber."
He eyes her waist, which grows under his stare.  Her jacket puffs out and she looks away, trying to conceal her embarrassment.  There are no young ladies to hold his attention this time, and so he stands and waits for her to do the same.  Her reluctance makes him impatiently scuff his feet.
"You used to tell me I was pretty all the time."
"You were."

They don't come back for two months after that.  The holidays are approaching and the park is frequented by a sole chipmunk, foraging candy wrappers and breadcrumbs.  One day an old woman shuffles down the path and carefully lowers herself onto the cold bench.  Her eyes may have been blue once, but now they're clouded over and sit below sagging lids.  Lines map their way across her face and her neck and chin collapse into themselves in folds of flesh.  A rattling sigh escapes her thin lips,  a hand reaches up to brush itself across the white hair. 
"I am ugly.  I am old."
She speaks to no one in particular, but the chipmunk stops it's scurrying momentarily to stare at the stranger.  She is still.

 Morning papers announce the tragedy: a woman, age 23, frozen to death last night by the Potomac.  Survived by her parents and a grieving fiance.  She was so young, so beautiful. 

Fight for me, damn it.