Absence

Yeah.

What color is loneliness?
What moves your eye when there is absence?

Plucked...that is the verb, the attribute...like when you are holding something in your hand and it is snatched away from you...possibly never to return.

The quick conversations.  The slightest of interactions.

If you could be just a bruise for a day...punch me, mark me.  Stay on me in a brief tattoo.

But the skin doesn't reveal what the heart knows.  Or what the mind retains.

Huge libraries of books about you...written about you, descriptions of you.  Latin, music, chorales and diatribes.  I spend the days trying to describe a you that I know to a world that only knows flowers and petals...colors and purples...sunsets and sunrises...pale moons and see-through seas...that's all they know.  They don't know the complexity of the view I have of you...the indescribable.  The phantom.

How do you communicate with only your hands.  How do you communicate with only a raised eyebrow?

Against a default setting where you find yourself not like the way I see you...you find faults and flaws...you find challenges and issues.

I strive...I climb walls...knock down doors to illuminate...like you were in a stone filled room with no windows I look to have you catch a simple glimpse.  The slight corner of your eye of a color or of some light.

Something piercing...something breaking through.

I've spent a million words attesting to your beauty but they fall wooden upon you.

I am not sure how to convince you that you are beautiful...not just in the classic sense but in the casual one as well.

Indulge me...pretend you are...persuade yourself.

Remember when you were in a mirror and loved it...and galvanize that....that is what I see.  That is my strike mark.

That is what I remember.

And ironically...when I perhaps see you again, that is my default.

A crystalline view of the person that I find again and again...and my gaze and my appreciation for a face that is so fetching I cannot stand its absence.