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...