Eye to Eye

Well, my love, it was the view from the west wing. I looked from the window, a storey above you, and saw your body reposed there on the sofa. Then, you looked up at me, and during that interlude where my pupils gathered your components together like a dustpan, we made history.

We stayed in the Hotel Lierre on the hill, overlooking a town that sat like a cavea around the sea. It was intimate, carefully engraved between limestone cliffs. The contingency of the town’s people rested on the shingled shores and the tideless waves that lapped against them. Men and women alike wandered around in their own translations of the heat: the solace of short holidays, the sweat of business, the deliberation of inhabitants. The latter group, with their sea-air lungs and citrus nails, they were inert. Whereas we, the excited youth, passing from citadel to seafront, negroni to negroni, we perspired and strolled around in the dust with a debonair indifference.

Then there was me: that large forehead glistening, and the frontal mass of black hair like sheep’s wool tugging at barbed wire. I smoked, and the wind took each exhale from my mouth and sent it towards the billowing curtains of balconies. Above, the morning flights laid their powdered trails across the blue dome.

I had not prepared myself. Is that how I knew it was genuine? You took up my night and my days without uttering a word. You wore those blacked-out clubmasters. I thought nothing of it until I saw you in the restaurant. You weren’t blind: when you noticed me looking, you shuffled in your seat. So why the sunglasses?

“You are mostly blind,” I repeated your words. “Entirely so without them on?”

You nodded.

It was nearing the end of summer. The seeds had fallen from the trees. I enjoyed feeling them crunch beneath my feet. We walked up the path together by the tennis courts. You remember? People were running around in their white costumes under the dappled shade. The soundscape consisted only of crickets, the soft smack of the balls and the shoes on asphalt, and then our muffled voices beneath the pines.

We visited that restaurant. You ordered me the pumpkin pasta and it came to our marble table as we sat on white wicker chairs. Coffee and cream followed, and two highballs of water. You held your hair in the wind.

Since then, everything has remained the same: never being simply the simplicity of your intelligence, beauty, or understanding that still draws my tide to your shores. Rather, it has been a particular fascination. The assortment of that which constitutes you, compacted into a remarkable being. The greatest source of wonder in my life. Today, the ease with which the distance of a moment between us turns from space to sentimentality, I believe, was founded in that balmy summer air between our two windows; a delicately violent strand of silk, unravelled by chance.

But there’s your eyes, always hidden behind that black vale. At night, when I cannot see you through the dark, you look at me. By day, when I cannot see you through the darkened glass of your clubmasters, you look at me.

I do not entertain the claim that people are made for one another. I avoid indulging in any fantasies of fate. Rather the narrative I prefer – that of romance – is that despite all the odds, our self-indulgence, the absurdity of a cosmos that rules above with indifference, we still were able to surrender ourselves to a fervent love for one another.

That first evening dinner has left its flavour on my tongue – the effervescence of the soda at the entry of ice, amber whiskey, milk pluming into the teacups like mushroom clouds, the packet of Spanish cigarillos and their hiss when you stubbed an end into the damp ashtray. You wore a striped dress and your hair fell from the middle of your head like black stage curtains. Some people sing songs or recite poetry to show their love. My job is easy. Pure honesty

We were in the lobby that night, then the garden room where they played jazz and served cocktails. We watched guests descend the soft carpeted stairs into the bar with the scagliola floor. Your heels clapped against it and echoed up to the cornicing. Then, with measured footsteps, some approached the pool through the archway, an oasis in the green of the flattened, manicured lawn. Deckchairs, vacant at night, were scattered around its perimeter under the absence of parasols. People towelled their flesh, palm branches escaped from the bushes, the stone slabs became wet with journeys of footprints.

You showed it to me: the highest and lowest form of liberty. You took all of mine, placing yourself within a you-shaped hole that existed in a region of my life until that moment. You forced me to surrender, and for that reason there was no freedom within this violence, until it subsided. Only then, I found the ultimate freedom behind it all. Each of my actions, that have since been adorned in a new coat, tell me that I am most free under your occupation, for each gesture of mine partakes in a meaning that transcends it. You, the most delicate of all, evoked within me a most violent impulse. These memories of ours, remain packaged away in a box of infinite capacity, fastened by the ribbon of your love.

All this, I realised one afternoon, walking down the street. It came to me as I walked, the idea of life in lieu of you, and I looked down to see half of me missing. My bisected shadow too, followed me around, and when I imagine a world where people saw life in the way I see you, I fall into love again. The connection between two is not material. It cannot be measured in width or weight. Rather, it can only be adjudicated by the value of its gestures, of its suffering, and its beauty.

And now, today, you took off the glasses. The candlelight fell soft on the folds of the untouched bedsheets, and behind you I admired the blue that cascaded through the window. Then, as you looked at me, I looked at you, and for the first time, through the space between us in which an infinite future laid, we saw eye to eye.