In the Light of Her Eyes

It began with a look—a look that pierced the dull haze of a rain-soaked Thursday afternoon in November.

I was seated at the window of an urban coffee shop, my nose fogged with steam from coffee and loneliness. Routine was life now. I worked, returned to an empty apartment, listened to the ticking clock at night, and asked myself when something would shatter this locked box I referred to as a heart.

She strolled in like the voice of poetry I had not yet read.

Her name was Elena. She didn't need to utter a word for the world to roil within her path. Her presence—long auburn locks dripping from the rain, soft fur wrapped around her arms, dark green forest eyes with secrets stored on every leaf—was sufficient to make even silence erupt into song.

I looked up. She looked down. And the world tilted a degree enough to make everything peculiar.

We met again a week later. Not accidentally—I returned to that café daily, beseeching chance. She sat across from me today, space now broken not by time but by valor.

"You always sit here," she said, smiling. "Like a sculpture waiting for the chisel."

I smiled. "Maybe I was waiting for the artist."

She raised an eyebrow, smiling and questioning. "And who might that be?"

"I hope you."

That evening, that talk, led us to a place where passion bloomed like secret flowers in the night. We talked for hours—about books, and stars, and the pain of loneliness despite crowds. She was an artist, a woman who loved light and shadows, her hands stained with pigments the way my heart was stained with silence.

She taught me how to see again—at the world, at myself. And I—bless my god—fell in love like a match falling into oil. Burning. Without warning. Devouring.

Our first night together was more redemption than sin.

She led me to her loft, the artist's sanctum above an antique bookstore. Rain drummed at the windows like applause, and the warm lamplight moved on her features like flame on a goddess.

When she stripped, it wasn't the removal of clothing. It was uncovering—a sacred laying bare of flesh and reality. She lay there, naked not just in flesh but in being, and I trembled not from passion but awe.

It was like writing poetry with fingers to touch her.

We were all of it that night—whispers and groans, lips and limbs, souls twisted together in desperate adoration. I loved her shape like holy phrases. She welcomed me into her as to home.

And in the gasps and the kisses, the sweat and the soul, love bloomed into something irrevocable.

But love isn't all hot nights and blissful mornings. Love, true love, cuts deeper.

Elena wasn't a easy person to love. She had days she lost herself, hours her shadows swept her light away. Her father had left when she was twelve years old. Her mother preferred vodka to lullabies. Her ex had shown her that trust was another word for fool.

I learned to wait on those days. To hold her without questioning. To leave notes on her pillow when she couldn't look at me.

"Love isn't about fixing," I'd tell myself. "It's about staying."

She cried one night—icy, brittle, shattering. And I wrapped her in arms as though the power of arms could restage her history.

We traveled together—to mountains and coastlines, to towns and far-off cities. We made love in foreign motel rooms, under starlight, beside rivers. We wrote sonnets on napkins and sketched sunsets on one another's skin.

But it wasn't always so.

There were fights. Over little things that hid bigger wounds. Over time. Over fear. Over how much we needed each other and how overwhelming that was.

"I don't want to be lost in you," she screamed once.

"And I don't want to be some other ghost who ghosts," I said.

Silence. Then soft apologies. Then sobbing laughter.

Once, we were snowed in at a cabin in Vermont during winter.

She stood in front of the fireplace, wearing nothing but a flannel shirt, reciting Neruda out loud. I watched her lips move with lines of love and longing, and I knew that time meant nothing. That this—her, us—was eternity in disguise.

We took our time, we revered each other, as if re-writing every sorrowful story that our bodies carried. Every kiss erased old pain. Every touch inscribed new beginnings.

Later, she bent over and whispered, "Do you believe there is love after death?"

"I do," I said. "If it's there, it resonates. In art. In poetry. In dreams. Maybe even stars."

She nodded and closed her eyes, her head nestled against my chest, breathing in sync with me like a hymn.

Spring brought its own changes. Elena's gallery gained national attention. She was offered a Paris residency for one year.

I coaxed her. She was destined to be great. But when she turned to me, eyes trembling, and whispered, "Come with me," I faltered.

My work. My heritage. My fear. All that was well I had known.

She left. I stayed.

And silence crept back into my life—not empty, but resonant.

We wrote. Long, heart-baring letters. She sent me sketches of women she met in Montmartre. I sent her poetry scribbled in the margins of books. We talked on the telephone from time to time, but the distance wasn't miles—it was the ache of missing.

I dated someone else for a while. Tried to smile again. But nothing arrived in the form of love she'd carved out inside me.

Love had changed me.

She once wrote:

"I look out at the Seine and I see your face. You are here and not here. I still love you. Maybe forever."

It had been a year. I was sitting in the café. Once, out of habit.

And she came in.

Same. Same magic. But stronger. Braver. And when she sat across from me, it was as though we had never parted at all and yet as though we had lived a whole lifetime apart.

"I never stopped loving you," I said to her.

"I know," she whispered. "Me too."

She walked away. Not from me. From herself. It was an act of love.

We didn't rush. We rebuilt—slow and sacred.

Now, years later, we still walk hand in hand through the insanity of life.

Through gray days and golden.

We spar sometimes. Love sometimes brings pain. But it never wears off.

I watch her paint by the moon at midnight. A haphazard knot of hair. A glass of wine beside her. And I write poems about her glow.

We both bear scars. But we wear them like medals.

For love—true, fiery, healing, hurting love—will not flinch from the blaze.

It is changed.

And out of the blaze, we were not injured.

We were born.