Blurred sight, tears fell. His, much like hers, was a silent cry, tears that blinded him as much as they seemed to blind her.
And though they continued to look, they could no longer see. All he saw was the cloudy black of those two eyes.
This was the result of forced feeling, and though they felt, neither him nor her could grasp the language to let it all out.
They settled on “I love you.” He laundered feeling underneath the word “love.” When the tears did not stop, he languished, feeling an all-too-familiar loneliness. Blinded by the tears, he no longer saw her. All he could smell was his own body odor, his own foul breath, as she exhaled in panicked, practiced bursts. He closed the eyes, opened them, and closed them again. He flushed the fresh tears, letting them fall down the borrowed body’s cheeks, her rosy cheeks, and felt each eyelid. He felt as her eyes anxiously moved left to right, as if reading how this will end.
What you must do.
He opened the eyes and used the same fingers to feel them out of their sockets. He handed them back to her alongside a forlorn, apologetic “I love you.”
She reached for them and blinked.
Tears beyond what she needed to feel, he was glad when she took them and, best of all, when she gave him his.
“Are we having fun?” as if to inquire how she felt. She nodded and placed her eyes in her borrowed face.
Blink, and he did the same.
HER TURN
“I love you,” she could finally see him through the worry. “I love you” she could recall the good between the bad. “I love you,” the words did not come but she remembered a time when coming froze everything until she felt every little thing, touch, taste, smell… until she exhaled, never more confident that she was alive.
“I love you,” became a cipher for dead speech, what he had said to her and what she said back. Tongues remained tight, and mouths dry, but a breath could be brought up if she felt it right.
“Are we having fun?” she might ask even though there was no answer because there really was no question. Yes, him and her together were a fun time, a fun coupling, no bother about the impossibility of their fun, and how really their past was as nonexistent as their future. It was what could be read between the lines, what happened between those transitory moments of reality, that she found escape.
Theirs was a fictional story, but it resembled the friction of affection when it did not fit for society.
“I love you,” the cipher to speak and say I’m sorry.
An “I love you” in return acted as an acceptance.
A follow-up from him “I love you” was to say that he wanted to apologize too.
Fun was the bargain they had bought, and though it might have never happened, in the dead of all dead seas, this vacant sea as invisible as it wanted to be, she fixed an image and hid behind what she couldn’t imagine herself to be.
But he brought her back.
He always brought her back. He was in tears, and so was she. Their’s was a past that could only be told here, after each perished, pardoned themselves from the life they never had.
Too young, maybe, but she reached as far as she could and, she knew him fully, knew him best. He lived twice as long as she but never breathed out once.
Never really blinked. His was a tense life, one full of held back tears and dozens of cries for help.
It was only now, after having borrowed his eyes, that she realized that he held it all back. Much like she was certain that he saw the ugly and the alien, the random grudges and the unneeded hate, that she fled and fought back with apathy, with ignorance.
He had seen all that and still said, “I love you.”
“I love you,” he handed back her eyes.
“I love you,” she gave him back his.
“I love you,” she would rather be blind than be alone.
“I love you,” embedding agreement with the inflection added to the “I” in “I love you.”
He could keep her smile. He gave her enough: He chose not to let go. Eventually they would.
The sea, maybe calm, would soon change. Nothing remained the same, and neither would she, no matter what she did to stay with him.
HIS TURN
Seeing with his own eyes, he could pick out a horizon of his choice. It was his to choose, for it was his eyes that would see. He traced the air into partitions and within those partitions he formed invisible pages. Extending a finger, he wrote onto the air and squinted to read what it became.
With his own eyes, he could see and could feel without tears forming; he could feel what little he felt and let it settle. Him and her could feel and soon, as they returned what they had borrowed, they would admit to themselves that this is what they’ve become.
They have met death and will be unable to escape it.
Words propped up like a skyline view in the distance; he observed the sea, waited for the sun to begin to set, before touching her. Sun never set until it was too late, and by the time it did, he discovered what, maybe, she already knew.
He could not touch her without touching himself.
“Are we having fun?” laundered the question of giving her a hand. When she gave, he gave both, gave both of her hands back, and she did the same.
With his calloused and fat fingers, he felt a body, his body, as she felt a body, hers.
This scene does not work.
The romance is clearly off the page.
He wanted to kiss her, but to kiss her, those lips would be so bitter. She reached below but felt his set rather than hers.
To make love was to make love with oneself, masturbation of a stranger duped into becoming you. It was sickening, and even more sickening was how he felt nothing, the severed senses, halved by demise, a demise that continued to loosen his grip, tempting him ceaselessly to just let go, die.
Die. You are dead.
What little he had to hold onto he still held, and never, not even once, did he question whether or not she would let go.
No letting go of each other.
A kiss he couldn’t take back, a kiss meant for her, but she still carried his complexion, and he was still girlish.
Worst of all was how he smelled; his odor on her did not match. It could have never been as wrong as it was here.
Sickness overcame them, and it was horrible to think that only sickness, the ugly of anything, could feel so bold on the wide-open sea. In fact, the sickness, the nausea, the disease felt sharper out here, wherever they were.
He could so easily succumb to it but instead he said, “I love you,” and she said it back.
Nothing laundered, no feeling, no sickness.
It was genuine, a genuine “I love you.”
HER TURN
More, much more than anyone could bargain for, she had returned to herself, felt with her own fingers, grasped with her own hands, and now able to hold back the tears, each feeling, no matter how construed and defeated, held there on the air, for her to see. Those blue eyes of hers could easily forget to blink.
Much like breath, she made a conscious choice to continue, and she continued mostly to be able to continue alongside him.
The coffin is the loneliest place for a person.
But with touch given back to her, she tried and he tried. She felt the sickness on her mouth, and soon she ran to the edge. She could see it so well, his reflection on the water, as she began to pretend to dry heave.
Exchanging “I love you’s” made it better, as perfect as can be. He held her hand and she held his.
No matter how ready they were, the sex eluded them.