Lost at Sea

When you look at one up close, you see unimaginable details in the iris. It’s a raw, living terrain of light and color through which another soul looks out from behind a veil of nerves and blood, brewing beneath like magma under the mantle. But these eyes, her eyes, burned as a tumultuous blue depth, filled with all of the fury of the Neptune; the rippling surface of the sea painted into a quiet peace from afar. With careful attention my mind wanders over this wondrous ring of infinitesimal brushstrokes caught in contrast between brilliant white and an abyssal core from which she lurks, down in the deep. I feel myself circling the deep; drifting through the rise and fall of endless crests and whitecaps, wordless, and impossibly lost. I have to turn away and focus my eyes on something far away just to redraw myself back into the chair across from her and not tumble out. Maybe one day I’ll know her eyes well enough not to flounder. Maybe I’ll have charted the ebb and flow of hues so well that I can navigate them without feeling uneasy. But for now every glimpse is an odyssey. That’s why I look at her the way I do, locking myself away in incomprehension, staring out a window; a portrait facing a painting.