Paperlife.

"Eye to Eye"

A time of innocence but also a time of no longer wanting to be innocent.
I knew I was different, and my interests were diverse from others.
When your eyes met mine, I felt like someone understood me.

Like we had an unspoken similarity...

From then on out, when we locked eyes occasionally,
Quizzical, clustered, and fluttered feelings arose.
But because of inexperience, I didn't know how to approach.

What was I to do?
What was I to say?

I'd just let my eyes do the work for me.
Responding to your optical talks, your questioning glances.
The stares into my mind, my heart, my soul...
The oddity that is a simple bodily gesture becoming an intense and cinematic form of connection.
It was now swallowing my life whole. Every day I would expect it, at least once.

And during casual chatter, when your name would flood out of my mouth to the companions and the associates of my world, I garnered warnings.

"Don't trust them."

A sea of confusion drowned my peace of mind. That feeling...

That dreadful feeling

Where your stomach is clenching and all you can think is "what am I getting myself into..." And when your name lit up my screen in spontaneity, followed by nonchalant light hearted swaps of words. The heart went from pale pink to red, and warmed.

But on a concrete aging campus you were nothing more than a pair of eyes. An optical moment in a setting of desks and paper. As days dimmed and brightened, whispers across the proximity swooned outwards. Words going out and stretching, grasping every earlobe, every person. During that time I'm sure someone wasn't going to enjoy the gossip folk data subtly caught by their sense of hearing in the echoing halls.

Then everything changed.
They weren't the same.

Finding myself in webs of lies, deceit, hypocrisy, and contradiction. Innate realization that I was probably...more than likely...just a pawn on someone's game board, a piece of entertainment.

An object.
To play with...

There I was in pure white clueless confusing pain, staring at them, arms straddled over the shoulders of a past lover. Feeling that feeling. That dreadful feeling once more. Only this time I knew what I got myself into. And I just wanted to get out.

Over time I grew tired and bothered. No longer wanting to be a slave to someone's mind games. The simmering; spit fire searing sentences flew out from every corner of my mind, to my mouth and towards my target. In result...summer months consisted of the same class setting with averted glances, and reinforced gazes.
Occasional eye rolls, and silent appall at the heart wrenching smudge that was in each of our views...

Physically we may have seen eye to eye, but advancing towards an in depth take on things, our looks just missed each other...our optic aim shooting far off away, never truly colliding.

I could never truly be mad. He ...was going through what I was going through, just differently.