i had a really cheesy thought in my head today. the kind of sappy romantic word clique that belongs on the pages of a two-dollar paperback with beautiful people tousling in the sand on the cover.
not in my head.

it has no place there, no right to seize control of the normally cold-blooded electrons firing off in my brain if for that one brief second: enough time to arrange a phrase in my head.

i was thinking about eyes.

it was a continuation of the conversation in the stars the other night with olivia and bailey.
eyes are the window to the soul; i believe that with every ounce of my being. a flash, a dart, a sparkle, a shift, dullness, coldness, distance, a mask, concentrated intensity. all of these and countless more can be observed of one eye in a millisecond. for spherical gobs of cells arranged to bring a picture of a body's surroundings to the brain, eyes manage to express an awful lot of conflict within a soul without ever actually moving.

i was dwelling on something lissa said about people's definitions of flirting, namely their relative breadth and narrowness. i couldn't find my own, and the immediate thought was obviously i don't know because i don't flirt on purpose. except i do. sometimes. once in a blue, blue moon.

but what is the difference? am i the only one who can tell? most likely. and i think i'm content with that. but at least i should know. and i finally realized what had been in front of me all along.

it's in the eyes.

i hunger for eye contact, on all planes, the one i refer to now especially. i need eye contact to survive. i reached the lowest of my lows before i broke down when friends refused to make eye contact. when they cut me so completely from their thoughts that i couldn't even see the hood i'd been seeing for months from a direct angle anymore. those were the times when i wanted to hold the wheel stubbornly straight on parran. when i didn't want to wake up and have to face the world. because what is worth facing when all there is to see is angry profiles?

i need souls to touch. and the more physical contact i want, the more eye contact i crave. and i had hurriedly forgotten the odd, unnerving sentence that flashed across my mind's eye during my lunch break at work until only a few moments ago.

i'm frightened and thrilled at the same time thinking of it, more the former than the latter, and so i will leave with this:

ink :: graphite