Eyes

I was seven years old the first time I got married.

I remember the weight of the dress before I remember my own name. It was heavy and white and warm, like it had been waiting for me longer than I had been alive. The fabric pressed against my shoulders with a seriousness I did not yet understand. The room was filled with the aroma of flowers I couldn’t name, their scent thick and unfamiliar; and the walls seemed older than the building that held them as if the space itself had been borrowed for the occasion. There were people there. I remember that much. Their voices softened as I entered, the way voices do when something inevitable is about to happen. No one smiled too widely. No one whispered. They all seemed like a blurry memory; a background character of my story. I am even unsure of the season but I do know I wanted to hold onto the feeling and the intensity of the dream; and take it with me but I couldn’t remember everything once I woke up.

But what I remember most are his eyes, the shape, how they made me feel, the exact tint of blue. They were impossibly blue. Not pale. Not gray. Blue with depth. A blue that did not end where it should have, as if they belonged to a larger body I could not yet see. When I looked into them, I felt chosen not by him; but by something moving through us both serendipitously. Excitement matched to it’s own certainty. The future collapsed inward and folding itself neatly into a single moment where I woke up knowing who I would marry. Cocky? Yeah, maybe.

The dream did not fade with daylight. It did not thin or lose its edges the way other dreams did. It stayed loud. Precise. Intact. Like a memory borrowed from somewhere I had not yet been. I carried it with me as a child carries a secret instruction without understanding how heavy it was or how long I would be expected to hold it. By the time I noticed boys, I was already looking for him. I was not the kind of boy crazy girl like some developed into; I was on a mission and from then on the ritual formed without asking me or anyone else’s permission.

Whenever I met someone with blue eyes; my hands would rise instinctively. I would cover his nose and mouth, then his hair, until only the eyes remained. Sometimes I did it physically, under the pretense of playfulness or curiosity. Sometimes only in my mind, reconstructing his face later, erasing each feature with care until nothing but the eyes remained. I learned how long to look. I learned how to feel the absence.

It was never him.

At first, I believed the ritual was mine. That I had invented it to protect myself from disappointment. But repetition stripped that belief away. The ritual did not comfort me. It corrected me. Each failure returned me to the same internal position: waiting. The ritual felt harmless; even romantic. I told myself I was honoring a promise made before I understood what promises were. I told myself I was protecting something sacred but repetition has a way of sharpening intention until it becomes compulsion.

Years passed. Faces blurred into categories. Blue eyes became checkpoints in between beautiful brown eyes or hazel and green. Relationships became holding patterns. Men loved me…some sort of gently without loyalty, some recklessly and I tried to love them back even if my heart was not in it. I tried to be present. But somewhere between the first conversation and the first confession, the ritual would surface, quiet and insistent. Combine that and incomplete loyalty and reckless treatment; why on earth would I want to stay and forget about a childish dream that felt real. Each time it failed…something tightened inside me like he had a grip on me without being present.

I began to fear that the dream was not a blessing but a summons one that would not stop calling until it was answered. I feared I was losing my mind. Love was not a priority to me; I can honestly say not in my top 10 of short term or long term goals. “Love” stopped feeling like discovery and started feeling like verification. I measured heavy moments against a memory that refused to age. Eventually, doubt crept in…foolish? Yes, you were 7 what on earth are you going on about?

I started to wonder if the dream had ruined my ability to be satisfied. I wondered if I had invented him to give shape to a loneliness I didn’t yet have. At night, I replayed the dream like evidence, searching for inconsistencies. Why couldn’t I remember his voice? Why couldn’t I remember his face? What kind of memory survives on only one detail? Any kind of detail that would point me in the right direction. The answer I feared was simple…maybe there had never been a boy, maybe there was never going to be a man.

Years before I met him, I stayed too long with someone whose eyes were almost right. The shade was close enough to confuse me. Close enough to keep me hoping. When I looked at him, the ritual hesitated…flickered; like a faulty signal. I told myself this was what a compromise felt like and that perhaps the dream had exaggerated happiness; as dreams often do. But the longer I stayed, the clearer the mismatch became; and the heavier my heart became with dark moments of mistreatment. This couldn’t be him! I remember in detail how I felt looking into his eyes and it was safe there; I was safe in his arms. This is not safety; it’s narcissism with opportunity because I had a dream.

The dream had felt safe. This did not.

The dream had felt chosen. This felt endured.

I lingered anyway confused by my own inertia until I could free myself. I waited for the happiness I remembered to surface, convinced it would arrive if I just stayed long enough. But something in me remained alert, braced, quietly disappointed. I could not understand why I was still there; only that leaving felt like abandoning the search altogether.

Solitude completed happiness and less stress but alas another pursuer I was not keen on entertaining. Tall. Distant. Blue-eyed…or at least I think they were blue. He was so tall I never quite looked directly at him long enough to be sure; I am not a fan of straining my neck. I tried with him out of principle. I told myself I didn’t want to be pessimistic. Didn’t want to miss something because of a childhood fixation. What if this was him but I literally could not see. When I attempted the ritual, it felt hollow. Unnecessary. As if my body already knew the answer. Hmph; foiled again.

And then I met him.

There was no thunder, no flowers blooming down the path that he walked. No immediate recognition. No dream rising up to greet me. Only the unsettling sensation of familiarity without context…the kind that makes your body react before your mind has decided what it feels. The kind of body reaction where I noticed the urge; that I wanted to kiss him. Not eventually. Immediately. The desire wasn’t romantic so much as corrective like closing a door that had been left open too long. It frightened me. It felt premature. Ancient?

I did not perform the ritual. Not because I resisted it but because it did not arise; viscerally I knew something that my head did not yet. We spent time together drinking coffee. A lot of it. Which was strange for me because I am not a coffee drinker; but I drank coffee with him multiple times a day. We sat across from each other, cup after cup, the table slowly filling with empty mugs. We talked in the slow, unguarded way people do when nothing is being extracted from the moment. There was no performance. No negotiation. I kept waiting for my intuition to speak. It had always been loud before. It had saved me before. It had warned me, pulled me away, sharpened my instincts into something like armor. This time…it was silent; like a child begging their parent for a piece of cake and finally silent when they get it.

The safety I felt around him was immediate and inexplicable. And it absolutely terrified me. Nothing was happening..that was the problem. There was no tension to manage, no instability to decode. My instincts, so used to scanning for exits, found nothing to grip. I felt myself fighting the calm, searching for the familiar signal that told me to leave.

It never came.

He remained gentle. Steady. Unchanged by my internal resistance and that steadiness felt like a threat. It was like watching a horror movie where nothing jumps out but you know something has already shifted. I was fighting my mind. Fighting the absence of fear. Fighting the quiet certainty settling into my bones. Maybe I should remember the ritual? But the ritual did not return. Instead, I sarcastically joked with the Gods. Half mockery, half plea, I told them that if this was real, they would have to be clearer. I gave them one sentence. A phrase so specific it could not be accidental. A final confirmation, spoken into the dark.

I did not repeat it. I did not write it down. I let it go.

Months later, standing beside him in the dark for no reason at all, he said it. The exact words. No pause. No explanation. As if the sentence had always been waiting for its moment. Lost my breath staring at his silhouette in the dark. My body reacted before my mind could catch up. Heat rushed through me. Everything went still. The feeling was not joy…it was arrival. So complete it felt like grief. I asked him why he would say something like that. He laughed and said he didn’t know. Said it had just come to him.

He still doesn’t know; maybe one day I will tell him. Since that moment, the ritual never returned. Not because I outgrew it. Not because I overcame it. But because it no longer needed to be performed.

Sometimes I think about the boy from the dream and wonder whether he was real, or whether he was a vessel; something shaped to guide me until I reached this moment. Sometimes I wonder if the ritual existed to keep me from choosing anyone else before it was time.

I don’t know what comes next. The dream has gone quiet. The mechanism has stopped adjusting. The vastness that once pressed against my choices has receded, leaving only the quiet aftermath of alignment. The gods have stopped speaking. The future no longer presses forward demanding recognition. But when I look into his eyes, I feel the same inevitability, the same certainty I did at seven years old. And I understand, finally, that the ritual was never abandoned, that love was never the point.

It was completed because his arrival was the point.