your eyes are green

Your eyes are green.

Green is for tender and young and moist. Green is for envy of what we have yet to live. Green is for grow and glow. You are a delicate leaf in the light. You are a firefly dance in the dark.

There is nothing else I can picture of you. You are the anyone to my noone. You look like no other. I could not begin to see you.

I clutch this crayon anyways. All I have is this green. All I’ve pictured since I was just barely no longer a child was this.

But do you remember? Do you remember what has yet to happen for you and me?

Do you remember my Mediterranean town where I used to look for you?

Were you there in the seaweed that I used to run though?

My summer cousins and I, we would sink beach-burned heels into the relief of wet sand, seawater lapping at our ankles. There was always that spot we could not avoid as we walked deeper in. They would wince at its touch; they felt only its trap, sticking to their feet. They would shudder; they would run to get free, run away to diamond blue depths of salt and ice. I ran with them too.

I should have lingered, as I wanted to. Those dirty green licks at my feet, soft and gentle. Those beating caresses in the waves. Rooted in one spot, always in motion. If you were there, I did not want to know it, I did not stay.

Do you remember how we could have chased and circled and tangled and fell into each other like vines? Plucking pleasure from my pussy with nimble fingers. Turgid, rooting and surging inside of me. Thrusting at me in strokes as I caved in like mossy earth to you.

Growing and pruning together. Touching, always touching. You were no choke, you were no competition. Would I have known this, that you could never have stolen anything from me? That there was room for each other? That you took my air and water and light, and that you were my air and water and light alike?

If I found you, would I have known this? Would I have stayed?

This is always how I pictured you, reaching to both sky and earth, steady and swaying, changing with the elements, dying many deaths and never giving up, deep-seated by my side.

Did I find you, and forget? Forget this early dream?

We had a flat roofed limestone house with bougainvillea creeping up one of its outside walls. We spent summers fanning each other to keep us cool, winters fanning our fires to keep us warm. We talked and shared and kissed and embraced under the shade of grapevine pergolas. We shopped at the local market, fresh fruit lined up on white sheets under muddy tents. Crouching villagers their vendors, shouting for us to buy. We taught grubby, grinning children at the peach colored primary school nearby. We walked to the tiny tobacco-scented town library. We jangled at our mandolin in our olive tree orchard. We created and birthed children, tangy, emerald, difficult children. We were farmers, we were builders. We were singers and seers and composers.

We were this. We could have been this. We were never this. We were never found. Could you hold on to that memory of us until ever and never?

I should have known to separate these deja vu salad dreams from you. But I couldn’t. I looked for you, and I saw all this.

But I tell myself this is all dead bark, gone and past. I tell myself I could not have born to be caught like that at all.

I look to open seas. I look again to float and drift free, untouched, away from it all.

I think now that I was wrong about you. You were everywhere. You were embedded and liberated at the same time. You were living firm in the sea bed, you were diffusing free in the sea. You were there, even as I ran away from you, I ran towards you. You were that hint of green warmth in the Aegean aquamarine.

I did not want to see. I needed to be blind, to separate. This you without limit scared me, so terrified always that you will be found and I will be lost, that you will never be found and we will be lost. That you exist, that you don’t exist: I don’t know what frightens me more.

Will you show yourself? Have you already been shown? Have I missed you? Do I miss you now?

I stroke like a wheel in and out of water, asking countless questions, I suffer to keep kicking, never wanting answers, so long as I am here, alive and afraid, moving always in a boiling sea.

If you are there no matter where I swim, if there is nowhere to swim to but you, should I swim faster, or tread in my spot?

Find me. Quench me. Swim by my side in this tempting turmoil. Tell me we can live happy in the eye of this storm. Tell me we need not travel, we need not run, we need not feel too grounded, we need not feel too high. We need not feel stuck or swept away.

That it is not us who has to move, but the world that will shift, whirlpool swirling oceans around steadfast us. Tell me this.

My green.

Note: Just a rough draft. Indulgently sappy. For the record, I really have been to that town, or a town just like it, many times, both as a child and not.