To see without my eyes

I read somewhere that the eye is the most lonely thing in the whole world.

It sees everything and yet retain nothing. The eye overwhelms the brain with information, with colors and images and scenery and people, with layers upon layers of reality like condensed fog. Yet when it closes, the eye is surrounded by pure darkness, penetrated only by random streaks of light - they themselves conveying neither memories or feelings. In other words, the eye is a sieve, passing through the innumerable grains of sand, that is life, without a trace.

What's more, the eye knows not, that so close to it, lies another eye, just as lonely, just as devoid of emotions, just as oblivious.

But, my love, my eye got to know itself - my eyes got to know themselves, truly and fully, not just mere reflections of the world outside, but as reflections of the world inside - when they bore into yours. And for a moment that lasted an eternity, I felt myself stripped bare of deceptions and duplicity, felt myself torn off the mask of pensiveness that had been my shield against the scorn of society just as it had been the prison encasing my passion and personality - I was exposed. To you. The most intense of my affection, the most bitter of my depression, the most traumatizing of my memories - the very best of my character, the very worst of my nature - burst out from the prison I erected, exploded from the Alcatraz built by myself. My eyes finally opened the window to my soul, for you, and for you only.
And that's when I closed my eyes. Not to shun you out of my windows. But to welcome you in, through the front door.

I knew then, as I had wished, prayed, sobbed that I could have known it sooner, that you loved the whole of me, that you opened your heart to the fullness of my cynical characteristic, that you welcomed it in, that you comforted it and soothe it with your voice and your compassionate love, just as you have opened your heart to the best of me - my stories of Greek mythologies, my fairy tales of flowers and rabbits and trees. It was when I closed my eyes that I finally understood that simple philosophy: that you loved me. All of me.

And it was when I closed my eyes, when I shut down the devices that, meant to appreciate beauty and receive compassion, I had manipulated to be judgmental and condescending, that I began to feel you. Not just see you as my lover, my boyfriend, my partner, but feel your love. I felt your touch across my body - the body that I have scorned in the mirror for not living up to my expectations, that I have wept for deriding from perfection portrayed on movies - and I felt your love coursing through my veins, fierce, affectionate, wild, coursing through my blood vessels and ignited me with an eternal flame.

Seventeen years of living, seventeen years of existence, seventeen years of jeering myself - to feel the presence of love in my mind... I was not accustomed to loving, and being loved. It felt alien, exotic, that feeling, and at the same time the most natural thing in existence.

Our lips met for the first time, the second, again, the third, the fourth...was that what love tasted like? Like sunlight condensed into you and melting on the tips of my tongue, like juice slowly trickling into my throat and into my heart? Was it natural, that in those moments I was seized by an unquenchable desire to freeze time, to preserve it for eternity, to forever illuminate its fragility and its resplendent beauty? Was it natural, that in those very moments when our bodies intertwined and our lips discover the landscape of the other, that I wanted so desperately to grasp a vision of mine - one about us, about us freed from the shackled of society, of us floating on top of the world, of us being who we are, openly, without cold gazes from others, without scorn, without harassments - to grasp it as to make it materialize?

Is it natural, that when I saw you I melt; that when my lips touched yours my mind gone overdrive; that when your head rested on my shoulders my imagination did two things at once - capture the moment to store away as a core memory, and simultaneously create a vision of a future of you and I, living and loving in a summer Italian mansion, calling each other by our own names like those in that infamous novel and film (Visions of Gideon, the very first song you gifted me, do you not remember?)... Perhaps all of that is natural. Perhaps we just happen to be an exception; you just happen to love me with untainted sincerity, and I just happen to imagine our future together in a society where relationships are fleeting and feelings are discarded - I have little idea. Nor do I wish to find out.

What is absolutely natural, though, is our love. It's the fact that I love you that you love me that I love me that you love you that we are all the same person that to love the other is to love oneself...And my cotton candy, my boyfriend, my dearest, my eyes had to be closed for me to realize that fact. And trust me when I say I love you - I have assuredly tried, and failed, to think of reasons not to.

This letter of mine is not coherent at all. Nevertheless, however jumbled and tangled, the feelings are there, and I hope you like it just as I loved the letters from you.

Your boyfriend.