BLUE EYES

By Millie Todd

He had blue eyes. Blue eyes and a nose slightly too big for his face. His lips were full, and they opened slightly when he was daydreaming. It made me want to kiss him. I felt it in my bones when he looked at me, all the way down to my toes. When he saw me, it felt as though he were seeing the whole universe within me.

He wore a locket with nothing inside; he just liked the locket. His favorite shoes were an off-white pair of Common Projects, but he bought a new pair every few months because he didn’t like them too dirty. He had sweatshirts from colleges he didn’t go to, some he had never even planned on going to. I bought him a sweatshirt once, from the concert where he told me he loved me. He never wore it.

We weren’t together long. Six months. But despite that, our love was seemingly inevitable. We hadn’t talked in years, and after one reunion lunch in Midtown, it was undeniable. For months, we communicated our love the best way we knew how. I did it through words, not all of them to him. I have dozens of journal entries full of the words I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. He communicated through touch. An arm around my shoulder at brunch with his parents, a hand on my knee while he drove, a piercing look from those blue eyes that pinned me in place. I think I understood him better than he understood me. There was so much I wanted to say and didn’t know how. I think it caught up to me.

The words never came out exactly how I intended. When we argued, it was impossible to articulate how I felt. I found myself crying in frustration. The only way I knew how to express myself was failing me, so instead, I wrote it down. It helped me, but it didn’t help us.

Eventually, we got lost. The words I wrote down grew scribbled and frequent, while the words passing between us lessened. One night he put me in an Uber, and when he looked at me, I didn’t feel it in my toes.