Before Counting Eyes

by Ash Beige Baby

(Best read while listening to “Midnight” by Coldplay.)

No one fits the role of villain.
Perhaps that is why this story
has never found a title.
and I have never doubted that I am loved.

There is someone who would become a wall
before the rain could ever reach me.
Only sometimes, I forget what it feels like to walk
when every step is feared for before I have even taken it.

And I truly want to understand.
Perhaps loving someone the world keeps noticing
is its own kind of exhaustion.
Perhaps fear, when it has nowhere else to go,
learns to disguise itself as care.

There are days when I'm in certain look
not so the world will glare at me,
just so I can still recognize the woman 

that quietly growing behind the mirror.
There are days when I tell a story,
and what is noticed first is not what I have said,
but who listened instead
who lingered, who cared.

I'm begging
Look at me
before you look at the shadows around me.
Notice me
before you begin counting the eyes that follow me.

I have never longed to be desired.
Something far rarer
to be loved without becoming smaller,
to be held without becoming enclosed.
Protection is not every door being locked,

nor every road declared forbidden.

Yet I do not want to move through the world
As if your heart has no place in my decisions.
I only ask room for mine still has a place in them too.

Because through unspoken days,
Somebody spends so long guarding the yard
watching every stranger at the gate,
counting every shadow that passes
that it forgets to turn on the light in the living room.

And the person inside,
though deeply loved,
sits quietly
in the dark.

Take me, and build a sanctuary
where concern may speak
and my voice may still answer;
where neither of us is confined,
and neither of us goes unheard.